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1.

It is interesting trying to bring into language the experience from what we have just done. It is almost getting stuck somewhere in my experience, but I cannot quite work out where. It almost feels as if, the capacity to bring the experience into language is not possible at this particular minute. I have been reflecting a bit on how much my capacity to bring something into language is mediated through writing as a preparation activity. Yes. So I know when I have been engaging with the stone in different ways over the last months there has been the very direct connection with the stone, and then there has been some written reflections and it is interesting now that I … it is not even getting stuck in my throat because that sounds as if there is already a word there. It is getting stuck somewhere in my body, in the sense that can’t, I feel that I need to make some notes and write to then think how bring some of that experience which we have just had into spoken language. This is interesting. Yes I had the same impulse now, I thought oh I need the translation time, I need the paper and the pen before I can speak, but then likewise, I realize I was looking at myself trying to deal with the situation. And what, and I think that this was already somehow part of, or I included that already in the exercise or in the experience. Because when we were doing it there was one moment that I could name it for myself so somehow, and this is something that stuck that I could somehow put into words. But it is like the stone, one focused condensed image, physical image that I had, so somehow it is going, the attempt to form words, since I know that this is coming, this is part of what we do, this was already engrained in the exercise, so then I can hold onto it. Like a mental note that I did during the exercise, when I understood that this is a moment that I can grasp. As there are all these nameless situations or moments that are not graspable yet and that need a different navigation in order to be communicated. And it is funny because the moment I could grasp was, and it is really an image, a physical image, it did not come as something that I could imagine. It was really a physical sensation turning into an image, of like how the stone is engrained in my skin. You know, like a tree can actually incorporate objects that he cannot get rid of, so they start to grow into the tree, or the tree incorporates the thing. Or I think that muscles do the same, they incorporate whatever comes in their process of growing, and I felt a bit like this at a certain moment with the stone. That it is part of my, I accepted it as being part of my structure. But I think that is it also refers to, this physical image relates to what I did at the level of the instruction, right. I grasped this moment as something that I could name and engrain in both ways. While there are a lot of growing processes going on that I cannot name and are not so sharp and materialized in any kind of language or image or … But maybethere is another way to refer to language, or to mobilize language in this situation, which I think would touch the point of what you say, something like using language aesthetically or considering that as an aesthetic practice. What is that? I think it is something different than, and I am going to use expressions that we, you, have been using. It is something different than talking about – this was not used. But it is something different than brings it into language, brings something into language – it is probably the experience. And this is different than to put into words, it is something different to forming words, I think it is something different than grasping or naming. I think that when we address language we automatically, spontaneously, think that it is about this and it can be about this. So I think we, if we think and now talk, or now mobilize language, we think it is about this. Yes. So, but there are alternatives to that, and I think that these alternatives can be developed to consider what is an aesthetic use of language. And maybe I begin with that saying if we think that the experience before using language, I mean we are also using language because we are talking and recording and listening, but OK, if we take only this as a framework of what we were doing. And if we take this as being aesthetic, which I would, what if when we move to the medium of language, what if we begin to act within the medium of language, continuing doing the same. And for me, it always is metaphoric, but the question of touching, of the with, is the most important thing, so I am listening to you and trying to escape these difficulties by trying to consider what it is to use language, I came to the idea of not to, I am going to use one of the expressions, not to bring to language, but bring it forth through or better with language. So there is a shift there. Not to bring it to language, with language being the grasping container, we bring it to be, but to bring it forth, continue to bring it to life, to continue experiencing, with language. So, the idea of the experience with language. Not forcing language to be a grasping tool. But a touching tool. So, we don’t have to, I think we enter with a certain rigidity, back to our school times. When we are playing and then suddenly we have to talk or to read or to write. This means like, I think we have embodied this rigidity, of abandoning the playfulness in order to reduce our movements and to talk and to write and to read. But it must not be like that. So we can just say. I mean to come to language could be such a movement, one of the movements that you were inducing with your instructions. So now you move your hands and touch the stone. OK, and now, I am trying, and now you either, one possibility, you begin to produce articulated sounds that touch the stone. Or now you take a pencil and begin to write and produce articulated signstouching the stone. So what I am trying to do is create, to keep the fundamental continuity of the mode of doing, and not to go into another, a rigidity, another functionality, another operability, because we enter, because we enter the medium of language. Yes. If I think of my experience there are two distinct openings of language that happened – one is in this key that you are describing, language unfolding from that experience, in the same key or texture as that experience, in a way. But then there is also something to do with, it was like this … this first was in this language-with, thinking-with kind, unfolding. But there was also something to do with, I do not know how to say it, something like reflective insights that specifically came from the material encounter, which I think are not of that kind but they are specifically only arising through that particular investigation. For example, one of the things I was doing, I have been engaging with the rock in the sense that it is around, but in the last days I was taking it when I go for a walk, taking it in my pocket, because I think a lot when I go for a walk. I was curious how this would be shaped by the feeling of the stone. One of the things I was doing, a bit like in the exercise that you have just done, was turning over the stone in the hand, and I suppose what struck me was the sense that this turning over of something was not dissimilar to thinking, except it was not linguistic thinking. My own, I mean people think in different ways, but I think linguistically, or rather I notice the linguistically thinking that I do and maybe I don’t notice the other kinds, but this felt different, it felt a cognitive operation but not a linguistic operation, and what was interesting for me … I came back and was then looking at cognition and I don’t think I had really understood the breadth of what cognition refers to and so much of this experience was reverberating with some of the non-linguistic dimensions of cognition which actually I do not really, necessarily, bring awareness to in my own experience, because linguistic cognition is so foregrounded. So I suppose what I am saying is that there were two things in my encounter with the stone, one was, or might be, a kind of linguistic manifestation that comes from that first, that follows the impulse of the material encounter with the stone into language, rather than it being about grasping it, but the other, was more like that there were very particular insights that seemed to arise around, in a way, different species of cognition, that really came to the fore, through the encounter with the stone. But this feels slightly different as a mode of thinking to what you were describing. So yes, I was coming back to this question am I really thinking with the stone, or am I thinking about the stone; thinking about the stone and not really thinking with it. I am curious about this, what it means to think with the stone. What I mean with that, I mean I had a mentoring session yesterday and these thoughts came up there, I think that the aboutness, I mean, I would like to make a distinction between aesthetic acting or aesthetic cognition and acting in a certain medium. I think that there is a tendency to think that aesthetic, it is related to a certain medium, I don’t think so. I completely separate both things. So aesthetic acting or aesthetic thinking for me is defined by a way of acting, by a disposition, and this can be realized in whatever medium. Nevertheless, the medium of course, changes the way we act, so there are things that are possible or easier, or impossible or more difficult, in one medium or the other. Then I think, for example, this form of relation we referred to with this aboutness, I think that this is very easy to be realised in language. Whereas this withness mode might be easier in the medium of a touching body. But I don’t think that it is exclusive. This is actually the condition of possibility of what I said before, I think this withness mode is also possible with language. With of course, with a certain mobilization of this medium, language. This must not be aimed at creating a discourse. Yes. I think that poetry is a rather withness mode – I mean writing or reading poetry – is a withness mode of mobilizing language. Let’s say, even if we would accept that poetry, a piece of poetry, would be thematizing something, I don’t know, I say something, love, or a stone, then we could agree in a certain way that it is about the stone, I think that the relation there will not be a relation of aboutness. But rather of making possible a certain way of relation with this issue, which I consider as touching. In terms of becoming in touch, or being in contact with, and I don’t think that this can be named as about. What if I let words arise out of the experience? I am just wondering. Instead of trying to grasp the experience out of words. I did not hear the last words. Can you hear me. I resonate very much with what you are saying. I actually had the impulse the whole time to jump into this withness, I feel very drawn to the withness with the stone actually. I was just wondering right now, what is the information, and our relation to information. When I hear you talking then this is also for me this moment of finding information, or more information, or what is the higher context, the context of the stone, where does it comes from, where does it go, what is it?  The questions – what can it tell me? So it is very interesting for me to listen to your language, your forming the words, and also the way you were expressing the word stone, how does it sound when I say, and you were explaining that it kind of gets stuck. There is this quality or the forming of the sounding while talking, and I kind of feel as if being present right now here with you, interacting with the thoughts and at the same time there is this stone in front of me, and I am also wondering, what is its presence there? And I really wonder what is this mouth and this tongue forming? And then relating to that stone is for me, the stone is so concrete, so materialized and so dense, in a way; and when I sense sometimes language can sometimes be very dense and very materialized, and there is a kind of quality of materializing terms or content. I am just meandering right now with my thoughts – what does it mean to speak, what does it mean to feel the sound of thought while I talk and my breath, doe the arise actually, does it arise some place in my body or it is some place up here, and then the thoughts starting to become words. I am feeling, I want to play with that … thinking of, thinking, forming, breathing, embodying, the relation, my relation, touch, tongue, and then there is this stone. Stone. Stone. I am just wondering the word stone, the tongue and the stone, I am wondering if the word stone has a similar, stone and stein in German, if it has a similar way of being, this like condensed. In German I have the feeling it is, the word really fits to the, to this materiality of the stone, and especially the experience I had made with it now, because it was very different to when I had it alone with me, it is very different this experience now than to working with it, playing with it, experimenting with it when I was alone. But now it has this, very much this mute quality of presence, a material physical presence which was shaping, somehow it is shaping … I started to think, I would be interested to see the stone and how the language shapes the way that I am or how I am acting, or how I am present in a way. The presence of this, how does it shape my presence? And of course it is not objective presence that is shaping each other but it is somehow an engrained process. So what does this, I was wondering now, what did the stone make me be? When, through the way that you guided my relation to it. And the same happens with the language, now speaking, the spoken language, and there was also, freely associating and getting back to some things that were triggered by listening to you, funnily enough the stone now was for me a complete mute object, I mean object, it was a mute thing. I had no, no relation to sound. To sounding. But before when I took it the first time in my hand I realized it has a very particular sound in the way that I can touch it. And I think I was never looking at the stone, actually. Not now and not before, I was never looking at an object, but rather … I cannot continue that thought. I think when I was saying looking, I was thinking … I am doing some training at the moment in awareness centred deep listening and I was trying to bring this practice to the stone. Because you can listen to someone who is silent and I was trying to bring that attitude of listening to the stone as well. So by looking, I was listening, it was in my visual sphere, but it was more about trying to activate a listening relationship to the stone. Listening to the muteness, I experienced the sense of muteness, no, maybe not muteness, because muteness seems to be so determined by language and it was not silent.  

I can start with something. And even now looking, continuing to look at the two lines, and I don’t know what lines you have actually. I think that there is some secret. Somehow for me, something happened that has to do with the, I had this feeling, still I, am having the feeling  ... the lines, the word spaciousness stuck in my mind probably and relating to that, like the lines relate to each other somehow, something of a three-dimensional space appeared and is still appearing. The way that you made me look at one line, trying to look at the other line in the same moment, something of a thing, almost as if the line started to move and then spaciousness then appeared or something of a space, maybe not spaciousness, space appeared, it became spacious. And maybe three-dimensionalistic, it was not the line, there were not two lines for me anymore, they are still not lines for me, so it stays the feeling that there is somehow space appears, maybe not three-dimensionality, but space and three-dimensional spaces within that space, but in general, space. And movement even – it became very moving and is still …For me it was also very interesting to observe the border of the paper, or the territory of the paper in a way, and what you are talking about, the continuity of space or where is the space actually happening, and I also had this impression of continuity of, as well space as and the objects, the paper was just a reference for what was continuing in the three-dimensionality for me as well, or maybe also embodying, I don’t know if this is the right thing, but there for me definitely was an experience which was much wider than the field of the paper. And I, I was also thinking about what is material, I mean, what is material? The stone material is resonating in a way, because, and this is so different for me, a note or a moment that could lead to anything, and it is this moment of becoming, it can be, and yet there is already, as if the recipe is already there. It is also for me, it was very interesting to look at the practice, I found it very beautiful in a way that we were invited by the practice to look first at one while already using this, the range of the sight already to include or integrate the other what is there, but focusing, having the focus like a torchlight on one, but at the same time realising that there is the other, and this is coming together. And also realizing that underneath or the even bigger space, spaciousness that is including all, and this expanded very much in my … while observing this and I found it very interesting, how big it can expand. Even endless, in a way. And then there is just this piece of paper in front of me with two lines on it. Actually, I have forgotten which lines I sent. I think I took a photograph somewhere. And I also found it interesting that there are appearing two lines but you do not know whether the line is in fact just one line in the end. Two ends that are showing. I mean in my drawing there are two lines but I thought maybe it is one line. Yes. So I – the experience of space just through a piece of paper is enough. I have no words for that actually. And also the space in between actually, when I read it, it was so logic, of course the space in between. Two things are placed, or I acknowledged them as two things, as being placed. But now it is really not about the space in between, I mean, how you were guiding us. I was struggling with the space in between because I was like what is the space in between? The space is there, and it is expanding. I had a feeling of it expanding, the space is expanding through going back and forth, to the lines, to one line and then to the other. But it was more space emerging maybe and then I am wondering, I don’t know, I am still wondering about space and spaciousness. Because space seems so un-concrete and abstract but then again also concrete. And it for me it is not concrete, it is more concrete in the sensation. But it is, because then I, I mean, I took in the whole space, the room I am in and how I was going back and forth from the lines into the wider environment of where I am and all the things, the stone, the table, the carpet, pieces that I can acknowledge as pieces and this feeling I had from the expansion of spaciousness from the lines actually travelled beyond the paper. And how that, I am wondering, again wondering how this spaciousness comes, this feeling of spaciousness comes through relating to a perception of how things are together somehow maybe. Things and how they are together, or how I perceive them as together, or not. I found it very different to engage with the drawings in this particular kind of way. As I have encountered them before, when I was encountering them before, because they came with the notes I was thinking a lot about the right and the left aspect of them, the right and the left hands. So thinking about the process of them being made. But here there was something very much to do with letting go of a sense of the history of their production to really focus on an encounter with what is perceptually there. It was interesting actually. The white of the paper was really lively – so it was flickery and lively, and there was a point where one of the lines completely disappeared. There was a kind of perceptual flashing and one line disappeared and then there was a moment where both lines disappeared. Which is quite amazing actually. This kind of lively lightness, a quality of lightness but within the materiality of the paper, was really striking. At one point my eye was really watering – there is a practice in the same tradition called trataka where you stare at something, and it is about bringing about the watering of the eye, and so it had a quality of the trataka practice. And then I felt I was drawn out of the experience towards reflecting on it, thinking about it in a different kind of way. One of the things that really strikes me is how out of practice my eyes are just in terms of the ocular muscles – it hurts to do this, it strains and I feel quite nauseous. I suppose I have been thinking about this sense of the sensori-motor aspect of aesthetic cognition and how, because my eyes are conditioned to operating in a certain way especially through so much screen work lately … how the narrowing of my ocular capacity narrows my perceptual capacity which narrows my cognitive capacity. It is very interesting actually … I have a yoga book that has a lot of eye exercises in it. Wow, I need to do those. I think of them as physical exercises to keep the eye health, but no, doing this exercise, it is not so much physical health but rather perceptual health, a cognitive health in a way. And I have not been thinking about, I have not been taking into consideration a sense of what comprises, what comprises, how perceptual capacity is strengthened or diminished by certain ways of using it. And this exercises shows that up quite strongly. The perceptual range that I am operating with quite often, again maybe this is a utilitarian range, an operative utilitarian range, it is so narrow, and to start exercising this. But this shimmer, the shimmering of it – this sense of giving time to something, giving time to something with a certain kind of engagement which I am not in the habit of doing. Again the flight of thought, a sense of when you notice it going into thought, does it really have to go into thought. Why can I not just stay with it? Why does thought get busy and excited? Can it not stay with? I guess it is the mind’s work, constantly. Or maybe I think at what cost. If I get busy with the thought, the excitement of thinking, the cost is that I am then exiting a different mode of engagement, or I am practicing one mode of engagement over another mode of engagement. Recognising what that habit does in terms of being open to the range of possibilities that experience brings. I am making a decision, I am making a decision to keep exiting one mode of encounter through preference of another mode of encounter. And that habit shapes my experience of the world – this is illuminating. For me the question of the frame was appearing. There were two framed lines. And someone can say this is obvious. It was not. There were two lines on a paper. Or maybe even two lines. And maybe this is also related to a question of information – which I relate to the question of the own features of something. We take for granted that they exist, we take for granted that there are own features of something, because we take for granted the reality of the something. So, or, because we think, in the paradigm of realism, and I think that this experience makes this paradigm absolutely impossible. I mean, not impossible, but not as solid as it seems to be, and it seems to be the most solid thing. And I believe less and less in this sense of extracting information, so I do much more believe or trust in being aware of experiences which is not about information but it is informing. So this is in terms of saying there is information here and I extract it, or no, information is being created in the sense of something coming to be and it is taking form, something is getting informed. So, somehow sequentially, after one another, both paradigms are possible, but not at the same time, they cannot coexist, so in this sense, yes, well making an ontology out of it. So, there were two lines and there were two framed lines – these are two different things. And the second was informed by this practice. And actually, other practices informed the first. I was referring to this artifact in a certain way that made me think about it, or made it appear to me. There were two lines and there were two framed lines. I was just thinking very practically I had the impulse at a certain moment to move the paper. I did move the paper. I had it in front of me lying on the table, and not touching it, and having it much more as an artifact, and then I moved it. And it was a bit like moving the hands before, the exercise, the moment when you … anyways, I mean, how do you modify the frame implicitly? Because I think I just did it, and then a shadow fell on it … I had it in my hand and it was not lying on the desk in front of me like this very respected piece of something, an artefact. And the shadow was falling, not directly but diffusing, so the light is changing actually on the paper and then some other like is coming from a different angle and it wasn’t even so much about the haptic of the paper, like feeling the haptic, but more like I had to move the lines maybe. Was I moving the lines, no I was not moving the lines, but I was moving the paper, let’s keep it there. And of course, it changes the frame that you set. Probably quite a lot without me noticing it. As you were talking there, I was reminded of the exercise that you asked us to do, where we were talking about the difference of the eye reaching, or maybe this is the same thing as we were talking about language, the difference between language grasping at something and trying to appropriate it, or the eye appropriating something, differently from letting it come, and actually I had not thought about this correspondence between language and the eye, this is maybe a nice way to hold it in mind. Letting language, letting … I cannot get it. Letting language receive, letting it come more. Yes, I think that there are these two movements of grasping or receiving, language can also work also like that. So I grasp the meaning through language and I write a definition – this would be like listening and looking instead of hearing and seeing. Whereas if I let words appear, without the intention of grasping something but rather creating, or reinforcing, or realizing an object of perception in language, this can also be the same. I mean, words, organized signs, organised graphic signs, sounds or images can be produced or emerge. They can be the result of self-centred, target-oriented, will-based actions or/and can be the result of a distributed field of agencies.  That is what I said, so for me, it is getting more and more clear – a mode or a variety of interaction and media, they are two different layers and they are not constitutive of each other, they coincide, and when they coincide in their realization of course they condition each other, but they are not constitutive of each other. And this is relevant for language, in terms of there is a variety of modes of interaction in the media of language, if we think that spoken language and written language are two different media. Both possibilities are there.

I was struggling with what I notice as, what I notated as, the constitution of this sphere. So it is like the beginning of the practice and for me this is an important foundational moment of this practice. Or the way I entered this practice. It begins also with an understanding of, or with an experience of the word in English of the German Nahbereich which for me not really fits. German word (see sabine score) … is very specific in German. And then I was like proximate sphere, or maybe I came to say the immediate sphere. So this is what resonates in terms of the sense in Nahbereich and immediate because it also relates to the question of how, how are my senses mobilized in order to constitute this sphere.  Because I think that this sphere is constituted through a certain mobilization of my senses. Meaning, how do I, so, what is the balance of senses, is there for example, is the visual sense remain being the dominant or is more tactile one, I even did not consider the olfactory or also not the sound one. So maybe there is a tactile … there was a dialectic between the tactile and the visual. And also in terms of visuality, so for me, it was a discovery of say well it depends on the inclination of my head. So if I go up, then I am opening this field of … no, sometimes we understand eyes, we perceive them as something projecting, this metaphors of projection, so like it is like the lights of a car, so you have to go down. You have to remind if you want to keep this there within my immediate sphere. And also in terms of I am able to touch, able to touch making a small movement, so all these questions are quite relative and undefined, So they must find a kind of a systemative attuning with one another. So how do I mobilise my visual sense, my tactile sense, and how do I do this in moving. I think that maybe because the time I focused this practice on this what I call constitution of the … what I liked was immediate sphere. In terms of I can reach it, whatever it is, in this sphere, immediately, in terms of without taking, without needing to, to, to, make a connection in between. So it is like if I see something I have to go there, so there is something in between my intention and me achieving this goal. So this would not be immediate. This is what I like about immediacy to express in English what Nahbereich means for me. I found the beginning of the practice again - similar to my experience from before - an interesting challenge, something to do with the transition into a practice, which takes me some time actually. To begin with there is something of a sense of deficit that comes, the deficit of my habitual way of being or how is this unlike me normal habits. So to begin with there is this threshold of rubbing up against habits of being in the world, I think in terms of immediately walking out of my house, in the sense of there are certain habits and patterns that come with that. I think that there is some kind of confrontation, almost in a sense of the automatic way I might move as I directly cross through the door into a bigger space. It is so automatic, it is the confrontation with the shock of that in a way, this is interesting. And then, something to do with, a whole period which was to do with the confrontation with the shock of certain habits … that ordinarily I would have a sense of where I am going. It would not be, it would not be at the level of the impulse of the proximate sphere, it would be more that I know that I am going for a walk around the park or I know, it is a hybrid of pre-planning and automatic habits, and I suppose that I am holding this idea of aesthetic thinking lightly in mind, and thinking how is this mode different? And then as I was moving outside, again, to begin with I found the stillness, the tuning in really necessary for my own practice. I could do this for a lot longer. It feels very necessary for me. Again there was something of a dropping in, it was a vertical register, it was a dropping in, a dropping into the world in a sense. But then there was something interesting that happened in that I can’t get out of that almost, and I don’t know whether it was to do with the focus on the proximate sphere as being something to do with the extremities of the body. It is almost like my attentional threshold was at the limit the body but within the body, and not … it was self-contained. I felt like an egg really, where the proximate edge of the body felt almost quite enclosing. So it was almost like I couldn’t discern, or couldn’t tap into an impulse to move, there was no reason to move almost. Maybe the impulse to move usually comes from a further away impulse, especially in terms of sight and hearing. I could hear the birds and I could see things, but no, it had to be within the reach of the arm. And as I came within the reach of the arm, I got stuck there. I could not tap into any curiosity to move somehow. One thing that was interesting actually, was as I was walking out there is a lot of redcurrant flower in season here - it is very pungent, a very pungent smell. And I like to take this off the bush and smell it. This was very nice - the smell suddenly activated a really different kind of stillness, a much less self-conscious stillness. I would hold the blossom to my nose and to begin with it was just nice just standing there and smelling it, but then to move with that, it was a very different kind of movement actually. I didn’t feel any pull to look further, my area of interest was much more close to my body but what was interesting was it was not introspective. So it stayed local to the body, very proximate to the body, but there was no tendency – which I can certainly have – to introspect. It stayed near, but not going into. I was also taking, while going down the stairs, I thought OK where do I go. I decided to stay where I am, and that was interesting because I stood in a kind of tunnel and then I also have this, this, I also had this question of how much is movement needed. It was not about, it was also sensing the movement already happening and by doing these really tiny shifts there were unfolding so many options so it was almost overwhelming to have all these options of coming into and realizing these moments of different light coming to my body. But I did not only realize it with my eyes I also realized it with my hands and with the front and the back and the sides. So the directions of things, I could also not move because of so many options in a way. Actually I am quite overwhelmed by all this density – I almost cannot find any words for now, I feel … what came to me was very much the sounding of things, and I could realize that the sounding of my breath would extend the proximate sphere or the moment, it kind of related to another dimension and this was really interesting to observe that, the sounding of the things and even the things that I cannot hear directly, kind of adapted to that sounding. The sounding was … and I was also questioning myself, where is my interest going? I mean, what is the, what do I follow and where does it come from? Listening to you, I noticed that aurality, so sound, listening, was not active at all, or if I recall the experience it was automatically situated outside of my what you call the attentional threshold and what I like to call the immediate sphere. There were these kids running on the side and I was like no, I didn’t attend. I mean I notice but I didn’t attend to that because I think, without making the decision, I situated sound outside this sphere, as not belonging to this sphere. I guess if there was something in the sphere which was mainly defined by visual perception and also in a second moment with my tactile perception, if it would have sound there then I would not have rejected it. It was not a categorical rejection of listening or hearing but everything that was activated in listening or hearing was outside of this sphere, and for this reason, discounted. I am trying to explain something, I mean it is a posterior explanation. It is me explaining now, an explanation of what I experienced. Can you say it in other words again? I mean you both were referring to the presence of aural objects or aural perceptions, and listening to you I noticed that on the one hand I was hearing them, there were sounds there - my memory of the experience is not without sounds but I situated these sounds outside of the immediate sphere, the sphere I was trying to keep and to protect. So sound was not part of it. It was around it, but not part of it. Interesting. And I imagined sound being part of it. Because if I recall what I have seen or what I have touched, there were things there that could have sounded. And then, I think, I guess I would not have excluded. Do you think, I wonder, I am departing now from my direct experiences but I am wondering whether … how to say it, that sound is present but rather than … a bit like what we were talking about in the sense of the difference between the eyes reaching towards something or receiving … I wonder whether the sound can be present but not in a reaching way. So there are the boys making the noise, which is over there, but there is still also a … is there something about the proximate experience of that would be much more at the level of the organ of the ear. So it would be present in the reception and not so much tethered to the object of the sound somehow. There was a nice moment on the walk that I was doing where the sun touched me, so it wasn’t so much that I was seeing the sun … though this is mixing the metaphors in a way, something to do with the feeling of something, something about the felt sensation of sound within the proximate sphere might still include sounds originating elsewhere but there is the registering of them, like the reverberation of them within the proximate sphere. I am speculating though, this was not in my experience. I think it was to do with, what I can recognize in my experience, is that somehow this immediate sphere or this attentional sphere was there, it had a kind of crispy edge. Like the egg, it was like the eggshell. I feel that what I was not noticing so much was the density of experience within the proximate sphere, so it stayed at the limit edge of the proximate sphere, so there was a moment where I was rubbing together my finger and my thumb and it felt that it was at these extremities where it was most attended to or kind of the place where air was touching my skin. So the skin, the skin experience of the body felt important, or dominant, it did not feel important, it felt dominant. But I think as a consequence, it is almost like the depth of the attention was a bit limited in my own practicing of it. Neither was it going into a more interior sense of sensation nor was it really going much beyond that limit. What I was curious about was whether the sense of the proximate sphere has to be activated in my own experience much more as a zone with spatial thickness to include more of the interior experiences of the body but might almost fluctuate beyond the limit of the body’s proximate sphere. It felt like that edge might have to shimmer a bit more really, to create a relationship really to the environment. It felt a bit hermetic at times. I think what you are touching upon is that, referring to sound is this where is the sound. There is a distinction - that is made in the history of sound - between the sound object and the sound body. So, what is producing, no, not what is producing, but what is creating the object, the conditions for the sound to be, what is the vibrating body, and where is the sound, which is not the same but we tend to say they are the same. It happens actually the same with the visual but it is more tricky to think in these terms. But the point is that we see not so much resonances as reflections. But of course we are not aware of it. The moment you said the sound touched me, there is a shift. There is a shift towards the sound object not the sound body, not what vibrates but what you called the interior, which I tend to understand as my experience of sound. Sound as my experience, like when the light touched me. Is this because of a moment when I really feel warm, for example, or is it something else. I think that this question seems to me absolutely relevant for the constitution of this sphere. Because this apparently clear distinction between senses of proximity or of distance is not so clear, if we think about it in these terms. So I mean, the question would be what is the sound and what is the image? So we don’t have in these two, these two are not equivalent somehow but we do not have words for the other senses that are similar to that so there is a collapse from image to sound. I always have to think now of the localization of the sound now, where is the local point, where is this local area? And, and, you have been talking before that you did not feel somehow internal or somehow external, you were explaining it different. I also found this interesting, this transition between inner and outer because it is not about being internal closed-up but it is something that is starting to relate, or letting the relation happening, or letting the connection happening. What you were explaining, you could not, we became aware of the sound but it was more outside of your immediate sphere, you were talking about this immediate sphere. So when is this moment that something is coming into this local … and with what actually, is it, what is this becoming aware of, coming connecting with, getting in touch with? What is this moment of happening where … where do I shift then, and where is the shift happening? And to what, I mean its … Yeah, but I mean, this, this shift, in this case, is very specific and I think this specificity is what makes for me, no, I mean when I am aware of something, but there is something more in this case, as, but I say, as belonging to my immediate sphere. Because if the question is whether am I aware it is another question, much wider. I was aware of these kids. Visually, in terms of sound, even maybe in terms of maybe my judgments about it. So no, there are different forms of presence of these kids. But the point is they were not present as belonging to or constituting my immediate sphere. I think that this is the specificity of this practice. So, in my attempt to maybe name or even categorise practices using continuous forms of practice of blahblahblah-ing, I was thinking maybe this is a practice of localizing proximity or delineating proximity, constituting proximity. I think, I think this one part of the practice, but it is not all. I think it is constituting … but it was not my intention to only focus on that. I became focused on that but I think it is only the first part of the practice. Once it is constituted, then there is another part of this practice. I think that this practice has two focuses and the first focus is a condition for the second: the constitution of this proximate sphere is a condition, in terms of once you are there, then, there is a shift that is maintained, no, then the focus shifts to another one, which is also what you were mentioning with the resonances or this other possible spheres of action. These happen in this sphere of proximity. It would be interesting to say now we change this to a medium distance, or far distance, it would be also possible in terms of establishing as you said, attentional thresholds or spheres. But then there is a second point, I think. I was just thinking now in the sense of what, let me think, the sense of, what am I thinking, there is something to do with I think, that I wasn’t quite able to dissolve the sense of the representational idea of the proximate sphere. While ever it existed as a kind of representation for me, what it strengthened was a sense of ‘me’, the egg of ‘me’ somehow. This is where the movement was harder, it was something to do with the representational idea of the sphere was somehow creating a sense of containment or withdrawal from the environment, almost like a barrier in some respects … when that edge was rendered more porous, or where the representation collapsed I think was where something was present within the proximate sphere that wasn’t me. The scent of the blossom. This was within my proximate sphere but not what I might call ‘me’. I think that there was something there to do with the collapse between what I am perceiving as external things in the world and what I am conceiving as myself. And there were a few moments in that experience where the edge was much more soft, but overall the experience, because I was holding onto this representational view of the proximate sphere rather than really letting myself feel it somehow … I was starting to think how might in be to come out of this, only in the beyond of the proximate sphere, disembodied really. I do not know where I am going with this, thinking about the way in which through a felt experience there was this breakdown in the classification of what is ‘my’ proximate sphere and in fact, that this is comprised of other things, other agencies. That is not coming out very well, but … I mean I couldn’t avoid to relate this to the conversation we have with our colleagues about the presence of the “I” in phenomenology. And I think, I have been thinking about that also when I was teaching, and I think that acting aesthetically, the “I” becomes a medium. For example, in this way that we are working clearly with perception, and when we know that perception, well, at least according to certain phenomenological points – which might be very criticized now in all this sorry, fashion, of new materialism, where it seems like a magic act of making subjectivity disappearing from the world – but when I perceive, it cannot be me who is perceiving and then there is a point, there is a point, no, there is a point, which is the origin of perspective which I think is unavoidable in perception. So, but, saying that, which applies I perceive around me, because I perceive from this point … I can imagine that I perceive from somewhere else but this would be imagination. This ‘I’ is not an egocentric ‘I’ – it opens up, it becomes for me a medium to define this sphere, and for me, what is relevant in the act of perceiving, what is in my experience, is this sphere which needs me as a point in the world to be defined but this ‘me as a point in the world’ is not the focus of my attention but this sphere needs operatively this point in the world to exist. But it is not egocentric. I wasn’t appearing. And I think in aesthetic experience there is a kind of this paradox, which is not, but it seems to be a paradox, that there is a hyper-activation of subjectivity, but subjectivity as egocentric experience disappears. I disappear in the moment that I am more active and more important, because of this subjectivity. I would say that aesthetic actions is, so, implies a nonegocentric use or mobilization of subjectivity. It is through me, but I do not appear.

I think that one of the things that I am noticing now coming back down to sitting, here, is something to do with a kind of momentum between a grounding experience, a settling experience, and then some of the practices had an agitating feeling in a sense, stirring in a sense really, even a bit excitable. And that movement between certain sense of, calming is not the right word, but a coming into a sense of stilling, and then, a sort of more agitated, is not the right word. Like frothy or something, like in the experience of writing, there were moments of frothiness and in the last practice, and then coming back to a stiller sense. I mean, I was now going back to the tuning in even and I think I had, something happened in the tuning, that I felt was similar to what I felt as the first moment, which is always the same for me, funnily enough. The moment of starting the proximity practice it always for me an excitement that happens on a very subtle, but very present in a way. And the word that is coming to me again is somehow … yes, well, the word that is coming is actualizing. Somehow I had the feeling that the excitement starts to happen both when there are possibilities that I don’t know, are actualized, or, I don’t know if this is the right English word to be honest, aktualisiert. And I felt similarly, not so much on the tuning in but also there is a sense of space or of place, I never really know well to distinguish both. I have not really made up my mind – maybe it is more place, like a place-ness. Almost as if, something in between, a space becomes a place and this is an exciting feeling. And then different processes start. But then is, I am quite happy that I realize it appearing in the tuning, already in the very beginning. That is how through the combination of circumstances, conditions, and our special situation to receive or to be able to work with something. Yes, that actualizes, I mean, I couldn’t really say yet what it is. But it is something, and it is immediate. It is not something that is projected, or that comes from a projection. It is really something that grounds in the same way. That is why I followed your thoughts, that is how I followed your thoughts. For me this has both a feeling of a verticality but from that maybe more like this than like this, or like this. Like a steam or something, it starts to steam up and thickens. And to sense these, I mean, through the actions, through the beginning I got more aware of this moment, because I take it for granted usually in a way. It is something I go through but I never pay attention to it. Today I sense very much this relation between the moment to receive something and what is it, and the moment where I actively move into, and I am wondering for me there is also a difference between this just be and receive, and at the same time, when to do an active movement. And today I felt, especially when I went out, to do the proximity score I actively walked and I could sense the relation by walking or by sensing the quality of thoughts changing, and I also related to yesterday I cannot verbalise. I realize this relation to language, or how to express the sensation – what do I sense, and where does the sensation start and where is it expressed, and what is thinking actually? I could relate very much the pace or speed of the thoughts whereas yesterday I almost couldn’t move, I had so many thoughts going on. And today, I had to move to form the thoughts differently. I also think about my relation to thoughts the whole time. I could not write at all. I was just reading and then by reading, thinking and observing the thoughts, and observe them first as a thought, just a simple thought. But then I also question how has the emotion evolved into a thought, or is there an emotional level, or is the thought a different … can the thought be, like when I am talking now, I do not go into that level of emotionality, like the excitement, so I realize that there are different levels of thoughts that connect in a specific form or that show up in a specific form with different qualities, with a different pace, with different … and I was thinking about that word expression and also the pressure, something has to become and come into life and come into a form. And there definitely for me there is a connection between this grounding aspect, this, and I can sense these two kind of perspectives, of encountering from different angles, the one is to open and let it be or what is the allowance of something, that is something that I was also thinking. What do I allow to be? What do I allow to happen? Do I decide to allow or is it just happening? And by becoming aware of it I allow for, and so I while writing, while you were writing I could physically feel somehow, it was an interesting observation for me to be physically present, while the writing is happening and also seeing this interweaving of movement, of the written text, and it was for me as if I would feel the sensation that you were talking about physically in my body. What does it mean to hold back or so I was, I can sense this net of physicality just being yet at the same time there is layers of different thoughts happening, different languages, different. And I was also thinking about the timing of being informed, being informed and what does it mean when I get information, then I need to kind of digest the information, and what does it mean for me? For me, for myself, then I realize that I need time to digest until it is transformed or integrated, the integration of information. And that this needs time, for me. My experience of the proximate score was very different to yesterday. It is interesting, I wonder whether, how much that might be to do with the writing preceding it, because in a way I suppose, the kind of environment that one feels easy in, or at ease, not easy but more ease, there is somehow a fluidity in a textural space, a textorium really, that I don’t always feel in a physical sense. It was interesting this movement from on a page to movement in space, this direction felt that it actually enabled a kind of fluidity. It wasn’t a kind of linguistic sensibility carrying on into the proximate sphere but it felt that it created a kind of fluidity. The score itself, I went to the park. I had to make a decision. I didn’t do the score to begin with, but got to where I wanted to be and then this is an interesting question about the continuity and discontinuity between the practices. The park was interesting because it is on a very steep gradient, so there were things that I was reflecting on, no that I was experiencing, that was enabling me to stay within the proximate sphere. One of them was the softness of the ground, rather than the pavement, something about this unevenness, this aliveness of the floor even. But the gradient of the hill that I was walking, not even walking, moving over, meant that I was not taking a straight path. I had come off the path basically, yesterday most of my movements were on a path. So there is something about this ‘off path’. And then because it is super steep I was drifting from side to side, and then what emerged didn’t emerge in any way yesterday, was something to do with exploration of the centre of gravity. Already to move up the hill my centre of gravity was tilted, or my body was more of a diagonal to cope with the hill, and this took me straight to the floor. There was something that was much more possible there between the relation between standing and moving the ground, and crouching and touching the floor with my hands. Sitting, even lying. There was somehow a range of physical movements that became more possible, that become very fluid, the line between these different modes was subtle. Especially between standing to crouching to touching the floor. I am interested in the proximate sphere as it got closer to the floor, and whether it stays evenly arm-distance in all directions, or whether it goes under the floor, it seemed as if it flattened as I came closer to the floor. But there was something to do with shifting a sense of gravity and shifting the head, the lowering that I found very interesting to think about in terms of thinking really, how it effects the quality of thinking? Then I reflected that my capacity for access into a space of aesthetic action feels so contingent on certain external circumstance – like the green space of the park. I know this because I use it as a space for walking when I am thinking. But seasonally and weather-wise, you know, just being able to go to the floor – this feels contingent on much bigger agencies. The quality of the wind, the quality of the light, the warmth, the weather, the season. And I also know this in my own working patterns as well. There is a coming alive in the moment that creates conditions for thinking somehow. The aspect of releasing and at the same time arising for me is very immanent into grounding. So there is always a release into and something that is uprising. I was just wondering picking up on how thinking becomes differently possible within different circumstances and what physical movement, what multidirectional physical movement does with it. Because I had a moment where I got stuck within the proximity score, it was more of a theoretical question, I mean theoretical in the sense that I could really say the question in the moment, which was how can I move on in terms of walking and take the, and move as I told to you, to move the proximity sphere with me, and I started to think that this is the wrong, it is not an adequate formulation, but still I kept with it and I got stuck. It didn’t move on, and then I realize that what I do in those situations usually is that I completely let go of the score. Everything. And I continued to move and then something happens and then this release through movement, it is a not projected movement let’s say, and then in the moment, I do it very intuitively, very often, and this is what I forget to tell in the score, this is an important part, to completely let go. And then something else comes back.  I think it is a coupling of letting go of an idea and in that moment a question, that I was thinking but maybe for sure not aesthetically thinking, but then through the physical, I think different kinds of physical processes, a different kind of thoughtful thinking action process starts and it couples back to an immediate … in that moment I let go, I continue with some movement and all of a sudden the immediateness of the sphere and some sensuous qualities that I dismissed when I was thinking about this specific question came back and it started to fall into place, no it didn’t start to fall in place, this is the wrong terminology, but something coupled differently again and started to make sense. And I was wondering a little bit, what are the deviations from the score, what are … another deviations I realised was how to wander off into the distance with my eyes, into the long distance and then come back and stay with the proximity even though I am leaving it. Maybe somehow the deviations also, strengthen what you are deviating away from. The question is, one possible question, what I heard you were saying is how much a score is understood as a system of rules of the game. If I compare it to a sport, there are certain rules. So if you play football you cannot touch the ball with the hands. These are the rules of the game. My question is how much the score works like that? Because there is no possible deviation of not touching the ball with the hands and the sense of this non-possible deviation is to play the game. So in games there is this paradox, of constraint in the negative sense as limitation and enabling. Because I have this set of rules which are limitations, means I cannot do. And basically a game is defined basically by things you cannot do. The game is allowed, it is enabled, it is possible, and my question in this regard is how to relate this idea of the game, I do not know if they are right but they feel right to me, to the score. SO in terms of saying, no I am not doing now this has a sense of bell of attention, I have to go back, I am outside of the practice, so I am outside of the game. I don’t know – it is a possibility. To understand the operability or the agency or simply to understand the or a score. In terms of no deviation but deviations happens. You find yourself outside of the score, which I do not recognize as proximity score, my sphere of proximity. So my tendency is to say, so my tendency is to doubt my words – one is to say now today I was focusing on sound again, because of how we were talking yesterday. No this is not, this does not belong to my sphere of proximity, I notice it and noticing this, I take this as a basis for saying go back to your sphere of proximity and maybe then I can open a field of considerations about why is this not part of it, of my sphere of proximity. Or in my case today what does the sound need to be part of my sphere of proximity and more precisely does the sound need something else than only being produced by what I only visually define or outline as my sphere of proximity, because this was the case, there was the sound of the music coming from a bar, it was a kiosk and there was music coming from there which was visually not what I was considering to be my sphere of proximity but which I accepted as belonging to this, and right after a bell of a clock which was farther away sounded and I was not sure about feeling it, how are my feelings of this sound belonging or not to my sphere of proximity. So all these thoughts happen in the field of a possible violation of the rules of the score. This actually means that I accept it, these rules. Then I come back to the sense of score as a set of rules, which actually was my first thought when I write the first score of the exploratory writing. When I wrote – not do that, not do that, not do that. Which is not nice. No. But no-one would say it is not nice when you play football if you say that you cannot touch the ball. It is not nice. No. It is what allows you to play football. So, yes, I cannot then, I cannot, I cannot, if I understand the score in terms of a game, of the rules of a game or for a game then this rule of not touching the ball, it does not appear to me, or I would not judge it in terms of it feels nice or not, or it is good or not. No this is how the game is. Exactly, what comes in there is the question of at what level of the game does the score play? And I think that there is a difference between football and these kind of you know score is the field where the score takes place - it is congruent in a way. While at least in my case how I work with scores, they, I don’t know, I have never thought about this in that way, but I would almost say the score is a tool that co-constitutes something, but it is not the only one. And there are a lot of other conditions happening all the time – one is the weather, one is one’s self, that in order to or maybe I think it is different also with me, because this is not the one and only way. I think it has to do with is the score part of other conditions even other scores or is the score the only reality in a way, I mean the reality in which you place other realities inside. There are different conditions and they are extremely changing, and interchanging all the time … but still this is more of a, still everything else is placed inside it. I never used the word deviation before but there comes another deviation … what comes in, I don’t know. I am not saying that the rules of the game, for sure not. Actually when you play football, you don’t see the rules. You can say that they are always there. Referee is the one to whom, but the rules are there, but the rules are not the game. I never said that the rules are everything – the rules are actually a small part of it. And, but they have a specific function, in the system of the game, in the reality of the game, in the actualization of the game. It is not everything – there is also weather and the state of the grass, a game is also a piece of life, but it is a piece of life enabled in a particular way by the rules of the game. These conditions your habits and then you have to be able to inhabit the field of potentiality that the rules enable. What is coming to mind is the difference between play and games, I am going off the work on Roger Caillois on games and play and one of the differentiations is that in a game the rules have become more crystallised as a kind of organisational principle. But even if I think about football there must have been a moment in football’s evolution before the rules became concretised into the set of rules they are now when the rules were capable of being modified in the process of playing. At what place does the score function – is it that it precedes action, or it is evolving through action, or even that it retrospectively gives a sense of structure to what has been.

So I will start with something of a physical image – it is almost the only sketch I was drawing. It is a big belly, big fat belly of a man that obviously likes to eat and drink. And then it is a belly that through this, it happened towards the end of the exploration, that I could, I could pass this belly which was then part of my Nahbereich. I realize that there was a chain of things happening and for me this moment of the big belly, being able to, not my belly but being part of me in a certain sense of, in the sense of, I felt that exploring this time more than any other time I felt the proximate, the Nahbereich, I will continue to use the German word, the Nahbereich actually is … when it constitutes itself and as much as I can help it or curate it, curate it, that its happening, that it likewise stays with me in one way or another and it is actually something that supports my being with the place let’s say, or the space. Maybe it constitutes the space that allows me to be with the place. And with the dynamics and with the activities, also with … it allows me to slip both physically into places where I wouldn’t stay, I wouldn’t linger, I wouldn’t dwell. But it also allows me to dwell in places I would say even of … value systems or sensemaking systems. I can almost slip in between, I can allow myself to be there and explore further steps from there. It is not a direct chain but in the end it got back to this man, there are a lot of men hanging around here on the streets. Not so many women of course. And it kind of allowed me, I could pass by this guy and really have a physical sensation of OK, OK, that belly is part of my Nahbereich and my Nahbereich is very much intrinsically connected to whatever is myself. So there is I think something of support that happens in that zone, where one shifts into the other and it then it shifts away. This also allowed me at times to stay with my Nahbereich but actually look out onto the street. Or I realized that I was standing right across somebody else on the other side of the street, you know directions probably like city planners probably built as a line drawn on a map happened in space, but I was still in that time zone that allowed me to be there. So it was a really … and another word that came up was gentleness, because I felt this time, I think it is a lot of what I am trying to reach actually. But still something happened on the physical level of gentleness and allowing myself, being allowed – not even allowing myself. It is not so much of a negotiation with myself in the first place, I mean of course this, but it not the point some how. But it produced or constituted a gentleness of being there and also physically of joints, articulating themselves differently. So also on a physical level, it is great this word articulate, how it means to articulate and also as far as I think, it is joining, it is a joint that is getting articulated and it can articulate in different directions. It can maybe articulate different directions … because I also realize I was turning microscopically and that allowed me to move into those inbetween places or into … maybe they are not inbetween, maybe they are just places. But they are really … it is also a feeling of moving into things. It is a different kind of choosing. I am actually wondering about the quality of this moving into, continuously moving into places and then accepting in a way, accepting the big belly. It is there, it is what it is, it is there with me, here. And then there is another here, happening. Then, the belly is not part of it anymore. But I think also connected to the moving into, no, not connected to the moving into ... but there is something of a next thing, a next thing, a next thing. So, I think also in terms of attention, paying attention to the things that are within. I had to look a lot to the ground again, so I am wondering, in the city at least, is the ground the only thing that is surely within my Nahbereich. While everything else can go in and out. And the stains on the ground and how the ground is repaired, how it opens up or the signs that are on the ground in order for you to move in particular directions and how it breaks and doesn’t fulfill if you are with it closely. It doesn’t fulfill that role anymore. Now I lost my thread. I started with ground. I don’t know what. Anyways the ground kind of is something that stays, while the upright I think is to really practice. There is something of us being upright, topologically, we have our hands free - we can look into far away. It is a challenge I think. So starting from your image of meeting a big belly, you mentioned this physical image in your Nahbereich, in your proximate sphere. This big belly caused a chain of things and you realized that by accepting that big belly as being there, and becoming part of yourself, even though it was not your belly. So there was this process of acceptance in your realization of the Nahbereich, and this supported your being with the place with the different dynamics, and it allowed you to slip and dwell in value systems and explore other steps from there. And you realized that there was many men on the street, not women. To realize that this continuation of, from there you could expand your attention into further or wider zones. You were talking about lines and then came up the gentleness, the gentleness allowed you to be, or allowed the constitution of the gentleness, the constitution of gentleness allowed the being there, or the articulation of, in different directions that could continue after, through the gentleness.  Being gentle with yourself and being … so there was this feeling of moving into things one after another. A different kind of choosing, continuously moving. Accepting what is there to move on. We are talking about the disappearance of one thing. Exploration, exploring – this was the first word I looked. It was surprising. Exploring: ex – out; and plorare, to weep, to cry. Then I looked at between. But I didn’t finish – there is the first, the ‘be’ seems to be rooted in ‘by’ and I did not have time to look at the etymology of by and ‘tween’ seems to stem from tweonum, two each. So I cannot, I would need more times to relate both parts – the ‘by’ and the ‘tweonum’. It is not Latin in this case. Then I had time to go for another, which was for me also interesting. Gentleness. Which comes from gentilis – from the same family or clan; and from gene to give birth. So, yes. So to explore with gentleness could be an interesting combination. To crying, giving birth in the same family or something like that, or belonging to, or giving yourself birth to your own family. Speaker becomes the Etymologist. Etymologist becomes the Listener. Listener becomes the Mirror. Mirror becomes the Speaker. Today I came up with the thought before we started – how to choose again? And there I also had this, well maybe a similar moment – I want to find a comfortable place for myself and so I straightly went there, where I went comfortable. So this was a place outside, nearby, not to walk too much. So I had to take care of this moment of how do I feel comfortable and there I realized aspects of being orientated and being disorientated. And I was wondering if there is in the planning of, is there aspects of orientation that means I plan or I know or I ... that include, that definitely includes a specific knowledge of, knowing what I need to do now. But then while being with my proximate sphere, or shift my attention to my proximate sphere I noticed moments of disorientation. And I appreciate these moments of being disoriented because I realized that only in these inbetween zones of being orientated and being disorientated, there are movements happening. And I could realize a kind of stretching out in different levels of the Nahbereich, so I could sense different distances of Nahbereich while using either sight or my auditory awareness or my senses, touching skin, these, there was a lot of differences in the qualities as well. And, as well as realized there was my need, for example, I needed to sit down. And this also came up and navigated me into a different kind of Nahbereich, or away from a Nahbereich that happened before. So there was also this shift between focusing the environment or the influence and imprints of the environment of myself on different levels but at the same time then realizing needs from the inside that also influenced the Nahbereich where I was actually. And I could sense very well the different temperatures, the temperature of the sun and then I also realized that there is a different temperature … I like this sense of temperature in terms of quality and also in terms of what makes me move. And I realized that warmth makes me move further on, it stimulates my curiosity when I feel warmth and maybe there is also a connection in feeling comfortable when it is warm. But at the same time a more colder temperature also pauses, or interrelates with a different kind of movement. And I like this range, this diversity – this range of temperatures that happened. And then I was also observing these different kinds of proximate sphere and I realized that one proximate sphere is interrelating or interacting with another by reaching into or reaching out of – there were these two qualities. This I could also sense physically – there is something that reaches out and I also realized that there are different zones in my body that relate differently to the proximate sphere. Either they are more reaching out areas, and others are more perceiving and, perceiving, the letting in or welcoming. Yes. So there was this spatial aspect of these transitional zones in a way of a quality of temperature, that always came back to this quality of temperature and then also observing and discovering different kinds of temperature in the surface with different kinds of … So one of the preconditions for exploring the Nahbereich was establishing a sense of comfort, or finding a place where it was possible to be comfortable. And once that sense of comfort had been established, what seemed to emerge was this interplay between a sense of orientation and a sense of disorientation. And it seemed that it was in the movement between orientation and disorientation, that the movement of curiosity began to arise in a way. So this shifting of attention, no maybe not shift of attention, shift of sensation between the orienting and the disorienting. And this sense of the Nahbereich not having a consistent contour but through the different senses this sense of modulation or variation between the edge of the Nahbereich – at times reaching further, at times feeling more proximate. And this was talked about later in terms of these different zones or even different qualities – there were parts of the body that felt as if they had more of a quality of reaching out towards a sense of external world if you like, and others which were more in the key of perceiving or letting in experience. So something .. the Nahbereich was not consistent but there was this range of experience happening within it. And then something to do with, again this interplay of two different forces. Here not so much to do with the interplay of orientation and disorientation but between the influence or pull of the environment and internal needs. And the dynamic or the navigation or the negotiation that was happening between these forces. So, I looked up first comfortable – comfortable comes from confortable- its Latin, it arrived in English through the French origin. Comfort from the Dutch, meaning mental and spiritual wellbeing but it is also connected to something cheerful, offering physical comfort. In another way, in another time, it was also used as a tranquil enjoyment. The word – com obviously comes from with, so it is Latin; and fortis coming from strong. So it is something with strength, connected to strength, to support you through strength. Then I looked up orientation – orientation found its way into being through the word orient, that has to do with the compass and the different direction of the compass. It is an arrangement the compass, and the orient as an arrangement to face east or any other specific direction. So orienting is a process of determining points of the compass, therefore of determining one’s own mental bearings. I looked up orient itself – firstly it is originally a word that is attributed to the South East of Europe, so there is a very clear focus from a central European perspective. But in Latin the origin in the rising sun, that is why it is south east from our perspective. So how to get it together. Speaker becomes the Etymologist. Etymologist becomes the Listener. Listener becomes the Mirror. Mirror becomes the Speaker. I was wanting, I had an urge to find a place, to go to a place to begin. It is a couple of minutes away, a park space. I think that this is to do with the neighbourhood, the residential neighbourhood, feels so overwhelming somehow, it feels very difficult to get in touch with the Nahbereich, because the habits and forces of nearby things is super strong. Maybe I was already thinking this is not a good thing, maybe I should try the neighbourhood. But anyway, I was in the park. And, I find it challenging to settle into the investigation in many respects, it is also as if there are so many possibilities I cannot settle, like an overwhelm of different calls or possibilities. Then I realize that this is not so much the case, it is I don’t necessarily – the impulse to move, the impulse of curiosity does not necessarily come from the matter of the body somehow. That if I … or rather the impulse to move does not really come from movement, or physical movement it seems. There is no, or there is little, momentum that arises from movement giving rise to movement. What I noticed was that I almost needed, no I found, certain kinds of micro-movements or other kinds of movements facilitated my movements. So what I was noticing to begin with was when I was looking, there was this kind of shimmering on my retina I guess, almost pixilated. And then from there, I noticed those floating shapes that you get on the surface of the eye – and I became interested in this as the proximate sphere, or as the edge of the body in a way. Just that sense of looking, but everything beyond the surface of my eye was blurred and all I can see the surface of my eye. So it is like the eye seeing itself somehow. And I think from there, I was almost like using the impulse of the movement of these floating phenomenon on my eye to take me in certain directions. So starting with this very micro-movement as something moved to follow that – so the movement of the head that was following a movement that was in myself but also not me, these things on the surface of my eye were calling me to move. And I think I was also moving in and out of the direct experience – I find that the movement away, where do my thoughts go, they wander into reflection quite often. Reflecting on the experience rather than being in the experience. Some of this reflection was on … my training is really in lens-based practice and time-based practice … so I think that there is something to do with optics and light that my own training as nurtured. So in the investigation it is often the call of light in some capacity that is drawing me. And this led on to an investigation of the shadow. I was reflecting, trying to work out, does my shadow comprise my proximate sphere or not. Because it is definitely in touch with me, but beyond the physical extension of my body. So I was doing some movements where I was trying to bring my shadow within the physical space of my proximate sphere, but this was not possible, because every time I moved the interplay of the sun, and my body and the shadow. As I move closer it kept moving away and as I was trying to reach towards it, it moves away. So there is this play of distance with the shadow. But something to do with trying to touch the limit of the shadow, this was also producing movement and I found that very interesting – there is a movement that was emerging out of necessity through an investigation that wasn’t the movement, if that makes sense. So the investigation was to do with whether it was possible to reach with my fingers, my physical body, the edge of the shadow and consequently there was a movement emerging from that. This sense of movement that emerges as a consequence of another investigation is something that I am interested in – it is almost like the movement needs mediating in some kind of way through another, through the prism of another investigation. I was thinking about this in relation to lens-based practice and the frame. Again, not again … that sense of dropping down – the movement investigation was micro. Maybe I was feeling doubtful or lacking confidence that the micro-movement was sufficient – if felt … ah, yes, there was something about non-expressivity. I did not want to do something that felt expressive. So, at the beginning there was a double difficulty – a difficulty to find the place to start and also a difficulty coming from the recognition or feeling the habits to be in the neighbourhood implies. You were doubting if you would or should begin in the neighbourhood but nevertheless you choose to begin in the park. And at the beginning you were facing another difficulty coming from the recognition of so many possibilities, facing this situation you came to wonder where the impulse to move comes from. And this is something that appears again in your experience. In the first realization it was the movement, the impulse to move doesn’t come from moving itself. And then you came to think about micro-movements as the source of movement, or as the origin of movement. In doing so, you came to see, or to be aware and to focus your attention on the floating images or things or phenomena on the surface of your eye. And you began to look at them, which led you back to this idea of micro-movements, the micro-movements of your head following these figures, these things on the surface of your eye. And then, the realization of the tendency to reflect on the practice arises. With this the realization that your training is based on light and on attention to the light. So I looked up neighbourhood – neighborly conduct, mutual friendliness. It comes from neighbor and hood and its modern sense of community of people who live close together is recorded by the 1920s, and then I looked up light. Brightness, radiant energy, that which makes things visible. Light. Daylight. Spiritual illumination from the Proto-Germanic leukhtam. Source also from old saxon, from the root leuk- "light, brightness. I also looked up surface from the French – surface, an outermost boundary, outside part. Sur – above. Face – see face – I have not looked up that. Patterned on Latin superficies "surface, upper side, top". Then I also looked up shadow - sceadwe, sceaduwe "the effect of interception of sunlight, dark image cast by someone or something when interposed between an object and a source of light," oblique cases ("to the," "from the," "of the," "in the"). So neighbourhood, light, surface, shadow I was looking at. So we move again, rest. So Speaker becomes the Etymologist. Etymologist becomes the Listener. Listener becomes the Mirror. Mirror becomes the Speaker. So, this time my way of getting, influenced by some, so thinking about some of my practices I decided to vary it a little bit in getting into the Nahbereich and I decided to use the walk to the place I would, I thought to begin, in a walking meditation mode, so focusing on the connection between my steps and my breath. And doing that, so when I do that I always bring the eyes down, and then I realize I was actually already constituting the Nahbereich. Although I didn’t intend to, I just intend to, also to enter in an aesthetic mode of acting, and when I realize that I continue with the plan. My plan was to reduce the rhythm, so I begin with four steps in and four steps out, which is quite fast for my experience of walking meditation … and my idea was to reduce this progressively and I did, also in terms of adopting this way of walking which might seem more estranged in a way in a place that is more far away from my apartment. And this is what I did. And I knew in advance which direction I was going to go, and it is a place where there is a change of neighbourhood and this also implies a change of urban texture. So I arrived at this place but I was already in my Nahbereich almost from the very beginning, and the most important thing was, the most important condition for that was to lower the eyes, the focus of my eyes. And, when I properly began, though I began before I intended to begin, I noticed something that I notice all the time, that is the Nahbereich tends to be stationary. There is a, for me in my experience, it is a not a contradiction, but it is a contradictory vector between establishing the Nahbereich, or constituting or co-constituting the Nahbereich, and moving. And in doing so, and in thinking that, I identify another bereich, another sphere, it is not another one, but I call it a middle one, a middle range. And I experience that, that this existence of the middle range or field, actually I realize this while I was writing, the existence of this middle range-field is not a problem for the Nahbereich. So it does not contribute to eliminate it, but rather helps the existence of, supports the existence of the Nahbereich by creating a kind of buffer, within which this Nahbereich can extend itself, or not extend, so the Nahbereich remains Nahbereich but can have a space of relaxation in another space and this allows the pressure that might arise out of these two vectors of being in the close field and being invite to having to move. So then I accepted this pulsation, this pulse of close and midrange, and this was positive for me inhabiting this, this Nahbereich.This time I went, I was going to say I allow myself, to be more tactile, to touch more the things, the matters, that belong, that appear in my Nahbereich. This was interesting for my promising action, so not to … to decentre from the visual and to allow tactile actions to be performed. And what happens from the very beginning is this enormous appearance of richness, so each centimeter, each site actually is full of interest, of attractors, of agencies. Reset. Mirror.  You started by two operations – one was the intention of reaching to a specific place that you had gone before and another used your own practice, a walking meditation practice to reach that specific place. You said afterwards that you wanted to, you made this decision because you wanted to reach a different neighbourhood, at least a different threshold between one and the other, a change, where the urban texture changes, and doing that by using your own meditation practice which combines steps and in and out breaths in a very specific structure. And, and it includes lowering your visual field to the ground, to lower the focus of the eyes to the ground. And, you did this to enter an aesthetic mode for entering the practice. And you realised that through entering your own practice you were already entering the proximity area, the proximity practice, but you only realized that while doing it.You played with the rhythm, so even there is something about the intention and the non-intention. So we had an intention to go somewhere to do the practice and you didn’t intend to start with the practice right away; but the practice started right away. Another intention was to structure the rhythm and play with coupling of breath and steps that brings you into a different kind of rhythms, no speeds. So, vary, variation – to transform, to change, to go astray. Change. Alter. Transform. Make different, bent or crooked. Constitute – to enter into the formation as a necessary part. From com- with and constituere "to cause to stand, set up”.Strange – unknown, not belonging, estranged, separate – from without, outside of. Lower – to descend, to sink or come to descend.  Stationary – having no apparent motion. Connected to station – station, the place which one normally occupies. Site or location. From the root sta, meaning to stand, to make or to be firm. Support – tolerate, bear, endure, sustain. To bring up or bring forward. From sub – up from under; and portare to carry or pass over. So, to bring up from under and to carry over. Buffer – absorbs a blow, deadens the concussion between a moving body and that against which it strikes. Prevent impact, neutralizes the shock of impact from opposing forces. Tactile – perceptible to touch, from the root tag – to touch or to handle. Vary. Constitute. (E)strange. Lower. Stationary. Support. Buffer. Tactile.

So trying to focus on the qualities or attributes of aesthetic thinking, of the relation of the practice to thinking … one of the things I was noticing was that that was, I noticed, I noticed that the condition of the Nahbereich. I had not seen this connection before but it feels like this is a condition of a certain kind of thinking. So, there was something to do with the qualities, in the practice that I was doing, but which I think is connected to aesthetic thinking, which is a relationship between being sufficiently connected to a certain degree of sensori-motor awareness but at the same time, and at the same time not distracted by the wider environment. So there was this dual relationship between activating a certain level of sensitivity or sensibility, and at the same time knocking back the wider sense of awareness.  So there was a kind of yes/no quality in the practice which was on the one hand, like I say, it was enabling, it was bringing into relation a certain quality of highly present, highly sensory engagement but at the same time keeping it contained within a certain sphere of experience in a way. So what I was doing is a walking and writing practice – and actually I realize, I had not realized before that these are the conditions of it. And, I think that there was also something to do with the capacity to be moving the body, or this movement betweenmovement and stillness seemed to be quite critical in a way. So the movement was also a way of holding attention, and then there are moments when a kind of linguistic thinking was beginning to happen. But it was held in a particular relation to the movement, and in a sense, it was coming from the conditions of that moving sensori-motor action. So what I was differentiating, what I was able to differentiate, was this is different to going on walk with a thought in mind and thinking about something whilst walking. So that kind of turning over a set of thinkings. So it was the opposite, it was beginning without the intention of thinking about something, and really beginning from the basis of establishing this condition of highly present but not distracted. So actually I was counting steps actually – not the breath and step correlation but counting steps. And every time I could feel that I was drifting off, there was something about coming back to this space of sensori-motor focus, but within the Nahbereich actually, within that specific containment. It was almost like being held within a certain fluid atmosphere - it was highly in the environment but also somehow slightly protected from it in a way or, no not protected … in it, but allowing the distraction part of the environment to be sort of held back. So there was something about this outside of the everydayness – and actually even something about being deeply being in the environment, in the situation but also being outside of it somehow. Really a contradictory sense of feeling deeply feeling connected to the environment, and here again, this relationship to the ground was really important, but somehow, the deeper the sensori-motor connection or the deeper the focus of the action got, the more it felt somehow connected to the environment but also outside of the environment. So there is this liminal sense, almost an out of timeness in a way. Yes, this out of timeness. Maybe going back to the sense of the balance – this just rightness of being sufficiently supported by the action … ah yes, this is right, there is something about the indirectness of the thinking, the thinking was not the focus. The walking was the focus that enabled the thinking to arise or emerge out of it. I could tell the difference because there was times in the action where I was thinking about something and it went off. And the quality of thinking that was coming from the action never went off. It stayed held within and there was something to do with trying to, not trying to push it further than it needed to go in a way. So staying only with the thought that arose specific to that moment and not pursuing it somehow – letting it come onto the page because I was making written notes, but then not going ah, yeah yeah yeah and wanting to develop it further. Letting it be. And then I would go back to the walking and then something else might arise. So I was also trying, not trying … it struck me that there was a difference between reflection on or reflection about and thinking-with. I think that this is also true of yesterday, when I thought I was reflecting on I don’t think I was, I think I was thinking with the action. I think that there is something about trying to differentiate those two modes which feels very critical in a way. Really the thinking coming out by, and conditioned by, and as a consequence of the action. And then there was something to with the way that the walking provided a quality of stability – so on the one hand it unhinged me from certain kinds of habits but on the other hand it provided a quality of stability. For I can get quite excited if I am thinking and it can go a bit giddy sometimes – like when I am going off it can go a little giddy, even a little ecstatic, where it can get a bit too much. So coming back to the walking grounded, and then this giddiness also goes away from being in the body and being connected to a sensori-motor experience. So this coming back, this coming back, enabled it to be sustained in some kind of way. And then towards the end I was going off, and I was thinking about this word ‘support’ which came up in yesterday’s etymological exploration. Something like – sub – up from under, and then carried over. Up from under and carried over. There is something of a quality of support in the action that enabled a sense of thinking, so this sense of it bubbling up from nowhere in a way. I think that the whole talk was structured by a duality from the very beginning and I think that this duality was expressed in different ways. At the beginning it was expressed as a duality between an intense connection, between sensori-motor awareness and high level of sensitivity with the environment and on the other hand avoiding the wider sphere of this environment. And then afterwards, this is expressed as a way of saying not being distracted by everything that is happening, but rather being contained or even protected from distractions. So, and afterwards this duality is also expressed, which for me is the same duality that appears expressed or formulated in different ways – this duality between on the one hand, between being deeply in the situation or connected to the environment and on the other hand and at the same time outside of the environment. There was also the expression of this everyday experience, no not everyday experience, a deep connection with it and a disconnection with it. Next point was also the idea of the indirectness of this kind of thinking. So it is a thinking, which is actually a consequence of other actions, in this case, walking, or a combination between walking and writing. And it is not a thinking that is pushed or pursued or developed. So it is not … it is a thinking that is to do with allowing the thinking to be thought, or the process of thinking to arise spontaneously out of something else, even out of nowhere, or out of this deep connection with the body, with the environment; in the connection between the body and the environment. And another expression, another duality, which is not the expression of the same duality, is the duality of reflecting on or about and thinking with. Understanding that, aesthetic thinking might have to do with the reflection with or the thinking with and not the thinking or reflection on or about. This kind of thinking has a continuity, which is sustained, so sustained by this highly sensitive sensori-motor self or sensori-motor body and environment. So I looked up thinking and I found several aspects of thinking or different ways of thinking – I found overthink, reasoning, cognitive, forethought. Overthink, also exhaust oneself with too much thinking. The reasoning – exercise of the act of reason, act or process of thinking logically. Also an instance of this reason. Cognitive – having the power of thinking or meditating. Thoughtful – given to contemplation. Forethought – a thinking before hand, the act of planning. Verbal noun – of fore think, of thinking before and to premeditate, consider, see forth. For and think. Then I looked up ground – an Old English grund "bottom; foundation; surface of the earth,"also "abyss, Hell," and "bottom of the sea". A "deep place". Swedish grund, there are all different kinds of grund."Ground, soil, bottom;"a shallow place. grund "field, plain," grunnr "bottom". And then I also looked up focus - "point of convergence," from Latin focus "hearth, fireplace" (also, figuratively, "home, family"), which is of unknown origin.Used in post-classical times for "fire" itself; taken by Kepler (1604) in a mathematical sense for "point of convergence," perhaps on analogy of the burning point of a lens (the purely optical sense of the word may have existed before Kepler, but it is not recorded). Introduced into English 1650s by Hobbes. Sense transfer to "center of activity or energy" is first recorded 1796. Activate – I looked up activate. "make active, intensify; see action meaning put into action. Originally in chemistry. Related - activated; activating. And then I looked up awareness –"state of being aware", from aware and ness. I looked up aware as an adjective – late Old English gewær "watchful, vigilant", from Proto-Germanic *ga-waraz (source also of Old Saxon giwar). For me, I was circling both around a word and not the definition of an action, because I realise again and again I, the word itself makes sense for me for the practice. But also I cannot define it in fact. So that was action that I was very busy with while being active with the action. And the word is diving. For me, it was very much, I mean, even to start the practice I realised that had to slip in a moment of tuning, of own tuning, to know what I would be doing. So this process of decision-making is a process that I need a physical, not an exercise, but I need some physical time in which I find the start for an exploration outside, for practising outside. In order to, and this start, to define it, is both through a word that comes from the scores, I call them operational scores that I have to facilitate the start, but still I never know which one is the one that I need now to start. The start of the start is the diving. So how is tuning going into diving at that moment, and the diving, there is this paradox of, of, of having this very clear word that came through practicing, that was found through practising, through communicating with the practice of others and that totally makes sense, physical and aesethetic sense for me. But still I have no idea how it actually works. So there is something I need to let work, and I have my tuning exercises to approach it, but maybe it is almost like a state, that is maybe a close definition to it. It is approaching, it has a feeling … that is why diving … for practising the city I need to reconfigure my ways of relating both to myself and to everything around. And likewise it is not a direct reconfiguration, it is not a reconfiguration that goes from A to B. It is somehow changing different screws … trying to turn them but also giving in to the turning of the screws. So, and this is a physical, sensori-motor process, but not only because language comes in that process continuously. I haven’t quite figured out how that actually works. But for example, the diving as a word is both a hook, like something I can come back to in order not to get lost, but simultaneously it is something that is totally open. But there is a moment where it happens, and this moment .. so I was also more busy with this process both because I haven’t really entered it for a long time, and also because we were so much talking about the conditions of aesthetic thinking to happen, through aesthetic research practices. How to enter, the question really how to enter. And of course, entering into what. So it is both conditioning one another and very much so with this mode of entering the city. So I somehow, a lot of things happen, but I somehow, finishing the sequence, I am jumping now through the whole trajectory, but finishing the sequence I start to, there are two things – I acknowledge by word and not only by doing, something of a deep pleasure and I think it has, it has a lot to do with this approach that could happen. The other thing is that maybe this entering, the diving in is something of an aesthetic mode of being with the city, but not giving into the city and this means also what I think, what I read, it is connected to the me as a socially constructed being, trying to read and to fit in another way. Thinking of my kids going to a German school trying to fit into a system that they don’t know – this is a different kind of fitting in. The fitting in through an aesthetic mode or actually the embedding of oneself, or letting oneself embed within the city is then a completely different verticality maybe and that goes back to the process of diving, and the process of diving actually even though it is something that I am trying to let happen, especially in the beginning in order to then start to go. Because what it does is allow movement, many movements, but foremost movement, like a shifting, transforming, transforming on many levels, transforming of reading, maybe also let reading rest as an activity. It also produces a kind of – one part of being with the city in that mode, it is not trying to understanding anything- it is rather the opposite. It is more … I need to think this, this process of diving is not only timewise in a one hour practice, it is not only at the beginning of a practice, it happens again and again and again and it deepens. It helps to, it happens. It doesn’t help for anything specific. One could probably name this but again it then has the danger of going into a one-way logic – it is good for something. And I think that the fact of it being at work is the important point somehow – it allows for a recalibration of relations, of reading, of making sense, very much of making sense. That was another thing – I have now making the notation, it allows for, it allows in the best moments for something I am not sure if it is connected to aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices – there was a moment, it allows for. So what I understood, you started by circling around a word which was not a definition for you. And the circling around this maybe phenomenon that makes a big sense for your practice, for a practice, you were talking about it as an active, it is activation with the action. You were describing, describing around and then you named the word diving as the start of the practice and also you were talking about the diving as something happening again and again, it is not a constant phenomenon. It is more something that appears again. And you had to prepare or to let this diving appear, slip into your own tuning. So after our common tuning you had to slip into your own tuning as a reference or establishing for the diving to happen. SO for you it was a process of physical time which you found the start to act. And you were talking about your operational scores, so called operational scores. And questioning yourself about what do I need to dive into. How is the tuning going into diving as a question. And you have no answer for that yet, it is, it was more of an observation – the diving is happening after you took care of several things. Like for example, you were mentioning books and material that you want to approach. SO you are establishing that field of work as a state, maybe or as a field. And then you were trying to describe this phenomenon or maybe magical moment – when is the diving happening and there you were also using this picture of screws that you have to use, or tuning in very different kind of screws that you cannot name more specifically. You were talking about screws that are in relation to each other and it is definitely a physical sensory mode, and then there is this moment when it happens but still you question yourself how to enter. How to enter this especially through this thinking aesthetic thinking through artistic research practices. Then you were coming back again about, talking about the importance for you to finish the sequence, you were explaining it was a deep pleasure and this deep pleasure also allowed you to move on and maybe to let the diving happen as a result or in connection with this pleasure and forms of happiness or forms of openness. And you were also talking about the difference between what it means to embed into the city and for you it was more of a vertical picture or vertical movement, more manifested in relation this embedded, there is the diving that allows more movement. It is not about understanding what you experience it is more about moving into and letting evolve something and you were talking about there is always as if it is an alive ecology of itself that happens and you are witnessing that, you are witnessing the diving. Circle - to encompass or surround. Active - "given to worldly activity" as opposed to contemplative or monastic. From actus  "a doing", from the root *ag- "to drive, draw out or forth, move". Capable of acting. Opposed to inactive, opposed to passive or reflexive. Dive – to descend or plunge headfirst. From dufan "to dive, duck, sink". From dyfan "to dip, submerge". From early thirteenth century as "to make a plunge". Figurative sense of "plunge entirely into something that engrosses the attention" is from 1580s. In Middle English also transitive, "to submerge (something), make to sink down. Then dive leading to deep - having considerable extension downward. Old Church Slavonic duno "bottom, foundation.Old Irish domun "world," via sense development from "bottom" to "foundation" to "earth" to "world").Extensive in any direction analogous to downward. Low in pitch, intense. Let - to allow, to let go, slacken. From  the root *lē-

Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to let go, slacken." Embed – from em- "put in or into, bring to a certain state,". Bed – a resting place; from *bhedh- "to dig, pierce" and beda- "to pierce, prick,". Again, from ongean - toward; opposite, against. From the Old Norse gegn "straight, direct." So something about this prefix a- … against the straight and direct, once more. Enter  – to go into, to initiate. 

The sounds and the images were on the one hand two parallel, autonomous layers, even worlds. Although sometimes they seemed to touch each other, or to have some points of coincidence, although I knew that this was not constructed. This was a coincidence actually. And yet somehow they belong, they have something in common, they have a common, maybe common atmosphere or a common environment. They still are, they still have, although one of these acoustic layers seems to have disappeared, it resonates, it keeps on resonating, as if sounds would have, the spoken words have found a place in the drawing very much. And continue, more than resonating there, resonate from there. There is something about a merging of felt or even physical rhythmical qualities that intrigue one another, I have the feeling. That goes both on a very, it is like Schinnung, I don’t know what the English word is for it, swinging, not really, so things start to swing with one another, begin to swing. But it is transforming all the time, there is something physical about it, that anticipates or sometimes even anticipated something that happened in the drawing on a complete … For me, I feel like moving actually. I am struck by the kind of interweaving of emergence between the different parts, I was just looking up this word, association. Because in a sense it feels like it is not that, so not association. A coming together, but not through association somehow. So association is this act of coming together for a common purpose, joining with, uniting with, companionship or ally. Organised body of persons with a common purpose, quality of or thing drawn to mind by something else. And, I get the sense that association would be more in this kind of, the association between the drawn and the spoken, between one component and another, and it felt much less easy to tell what was originating and what was responding. So this sense of the mutual that came up, this mutual emergence, each creating the conditions for the other. Somehow. And alsobetween the voices. Yes, the consequential aspect of cause and effect, or the chronological aspect of cause and effect, felt complicated, more like a web of relations. I am wondering if association, if you take it apart, it is neither dissociation, or in my feeling, associate, like a-sociation, something that is being directly put and combined with one another. It is also not what appeared very often, that this something, it is like a something, a moment, it occupies a third space or defines even a third space or a different type of sociating of things, that are maybe together but not shared. As I look a little further it seems that there is this sense of to follow. I guess the sense of this mutuality complicates the idea of following, yes mutual. This is interesting – neither follower or leader, but a mutual arising of something. Reciprocity, this reciprocity of giving and receiving. This notion of the common is there, meaning the common, freely interchanged. It is a common which is not at the beginning there, a common which is happening, but only exists if it happens, when it happens. And it does not leave, or maybe yes it leaves traces, but it is not a stable thing as such, so it is an affect, it is something not intended, not constructed. Not even sustained, not sustainable. It is sustainable but it is not sustained. Or if the common or the mutual is not intended, I am wondering. Because I had the feeling like it is common but it is an unknown common. So it is not, it is like an alien, let’s say unknown, it felt like in many parts I can’t, I couldn’t name, or the common doesn’t feel associated as something together, it doesn’t feel like something known in the sense of common, common as something that I can recognize, that I can re-cognize. It is a different common that kind of emerges. This sense of intending, the dual sense of having directed one’s attention to ... so intend, to direct one’s attention, literally to stretch out towards, also has the sense of having a plan in mind or having a purpose. So this interesting double possibility of not intending might mean to not have a plan or purpose in mind, but it could also mean to not direct one’s attention, or to direct one’s attention elsewhere. To turn one’s attention away from. Or even not moving towards something. It is a kind of moving displacement shifts with a purpose or a goal or at least a horizon, so at least in this sense the commonalities we sensed were not intended. Here in intend, the sense of turning one’s attention as in to strain in the quest for something, a quality of zealousness or zeal. So to not intend, might mean to not strain. So here to strain is to bind or tie, to fasten, draw tight, congeal or freeze or become stiff. Again there is this quality of tightening or of making taut … exertion, yes, to over exert. So without over-exertion. Or to unfasten, to untie, to unbind. To not intend, to unbind, untie, unfasten. To un-congeal, to unfreeze, to loosen, relax. Or collapse. This coming into form of a very particular configuration and something in the situation shifting which suddenly changes the register of what is being seen or being experienced. The removal of something, or the shifting of something that suddenly brings the background into the fore. Or the periphery somehow into a more focused attention. Or the constitution of time relating to something that already happened and something that is not here yet. I think here also this sense of holding back, holding back, in order to let something emerge, holding back something. Or withdrawal, holding back, withdrawal. Inhibition even, in order to let something else exert itself or emerge or bloom. Constitution as physical health, strength and vigour of the body and of the mind as temperament and character. So maybe … the dynamics of how things are constituted. I find it interesting that there is a direct history in the word that has to do with the physicality in both temperament as well as the strength and physicality of the body. That very strongly has to do with how things become constituted and later becomes a mode of organization for example, the state. This sense of the paper, the movement of something, attending to the movement of something else, somehow enabling the movement of the thinking and the speaking and then in the stillness a shift in tone, maybe a sense of searching more actively for something to grasp on to. And the movement in the frame allows or even lubricating a more fluid sense of connections between words and now in the stillness almost a sense of grasping for something, like no longer being carried by it, this sense of being carried by something a little, or supported by something, like a kind of thinking that is supported by something or carried by something or taken along in a way, no. What supports or carries the thinking-doing? Or carried out, maybe it is to be carried out of oneself, myself, this engagement with the movement carries me out of myself somehow. Yes, I am not so much following, not so much following something, as being carried by it. Or taken with it. Carried or taken or moved by a momentum that I am not fully in control of somehow. Like a breeze. There is a breeze in there. Floated almost. Or sliding, this reference to sliding earlier. This movement from walking into sliding, or skating, or gliding. There is a movement into continuity in some ways I guess. Or it is a movement that is, you have to give over to the ice. You have to give over more of the agency to ice in order to skate or to glide. Yes. What happens then if the eyes are not, can’t, I mean, if the eyes, if you, what is the sliding without the eyes? I think that there is some, or there is different types of engagement of the eyes, and how the eyes work, in relation to the common or the mutual or how that co-constitutes the common and mutual, that acts. On the one hand, there is something with the eyes which is very separating. I feel it works on the basis of this separation between something being seen and where the seeing happens. On the other hand, sometimes there is a transmission beyond that but while the eyes are still important, so not seeing, would make it maybe impossible, there is something a movement quality of the … this term to glide, glide away or vanish, to slip. Involving notions of smoothness, shining and joyfulness. From the root, ghel, meaning to call. To call or to shine. The joy, this sense of delight, and pleasure, this gliding with some degree of pleasure. Or to entice or lure.

2.

It is interesting trying to bring into language the experience from what we have just done. It is almost getting stuck somewhere in my experience, but I cannot quite work out where. It almost feels as if, the capacity to bring the experience into language is not possible at this particular minute. I have been reflecting a bit on how much my capacity to bring something into language is mediated through writing as a preparation activity. Yes. So I know when I have been engaging with the stone in different ways over the last months there has been the very direct connection with the stone, and then there has been some written reflections and it is interesting now that I … it is not even getting stuck in my throat because that sounds as if there is already a word there. It is getting stuck somewhere in my body, in the sense that can’t, I feel that I need to make some notes and write to then think how bring some of that experience which we have just had into spoken language. This is interesting. Yes I had the same impulse now, I thought oh I need the translation time, I need the paper and the pen before I can speak, but then likewise, I realize I was looking at myself trying to deal with the situation. And what, and I think that this was already somehow part of, or I included that already in the exercise or in the experience. Because when we were doing it there was one moment that I could name it for myself so somehow, and this is something that stuck that I could somehow put into words. But it is like the stone, one focused condensed image, physical image that I had, so somehow it is going, the attempt to form words, since I know that this is coming, this is part of what we do, this was already engrained in the exercise, so then I can hold onto it. Like a mental note that I did during the exercise, when I understood that this is a moment that I can grasp. As there are all these nameless situations or moments that are not graspable yet and that need a different navigation in order to be communicated. And it is funny because the moment I could grasp was, and it is really an image, a physical image, it did not come as something that I could imagine. It was really a physical sensation turning into an image, of like how the stone is engrained in my skin. You know, like a tree can actually incorporate objects that he cannot get rid of, so they start to grow into the tree, or the tree incorporates the thing. Or I think that muscles do the same, they incorporate whatever comes in their process of growing, and I felt a bit like this at a certain moment with the stone. That it is part of my, I accepted it as being part of my structure. But I think that is it also refers to, this physical image relates to what I did at the level of the instruction, right. I grasped this moment as something that I could name and engrain in both ways. While there are a lot of growing processes going on that I cannot name and are not so sharp and materialized in any kind of language or image or … But maybe there is another way to refer to language, or to mobilize language in this situation, which I think would touch the point of what you say, something like using language aesthetically or considering that as an aesthetic practice. What is that? I think it is something different than, and I am going to use expressions that we, you, have been using. It is something different than talking about – this was not used. But it is something different than brings it into language, brings something into language – it is probably the experience. And this is different than to put into words, it is something different to forming words, I think it is something different than grasping or naming. I think that when we address language we automatically, spontaneously, think that it is about this and it can be about this. So I think we, if we think and now talk, or now mobilize language, we think it is about this. Yes. So, but there are alternatives to that, and I think that these alternatives can be developed to consider what is an aesthetic use of language. And maybe I begin with that saying if we think that the experience before using language, I mean we are also using language because we are talking and recording and listening, but OK, if we take only this as a framework of what we were doing. And if we take this as being aesthetic, which I would, what if when we move to the medium of language, what if we begin to act within the medium of language, continuing doing the same. And for me, it always is metaphoric, but the question of touching, of the with, is the most important thing, so I am listening to you and trying to escape these difficulties by trying to consider what it is to use language, I came to the idea of not to, I am going to use one of the expressions, not to bring to language, but bring it forth through or better with language. So there is a shift there. Not to bring it to language, with language being the grasping container, we bring it to be, but to bring it forth, continue to bring it to life, to continue experiencing, with language. So, the idea of the experience with language. Not forcing language to be a grasping tool. But a touching tool. So, we don’t have to, I think we enter with a certain rigidity, back to our school times. When we are playing and then suddenly we have to talk or to read or to write. This means like, I think we have embodied this rigidity, of abandoning the playfulness in order to reduce our movements and to talk and to write and to read. But it must not be like that. So we can just say. I mean to come to language could be such a movement, one of the movements that you were inducing with your instructions. So now you move your hands and touch the stone. OK, and now, I am trying, and now you either, one possibility, you begin to produce articulated sounds that touch the stone. Or now you take a pencil andbegin to write and produce articulated signstouching the stone. So what I am trying to do is create, to keep the fundamental continuity of the mode of doing, and not to go into another, a rigidity, another functionality, another operability, because we enter, because we enter the medium of language. Yes. If I think of my experience there are two distinct openings of language that happened – one is in this key that you are describing, language unfolding from that experience, in the same key or texture as that experience, in a way. But then there is also something to do with, it was like this … this first was in this language-with, thinking-with kind, unfolding. But there was also something to do with, I do not know how to say it, something like reflective insights that specifically came from the material encounter, which I think are not of that kind but they are specifically only arising through that particular investigation. For example, one of the things I was doing, I have been engaging with the rock in the sense that it is around, but in the last days I was taking it when I go for a walk, taking it in my pocket, because I think a lot when I go for a walk. I was curious how this would be shaped by the feeling of the stone. One of the things I was doing, a bit like in the exercise that you have just done, was turning over the stone in the hand, and I suppose what struck me was the sense that this turning over of something was not dissimilar to thinking, except it was not linguistic thinking. My own, I mean people think in different ways, but I think linguistically, or rather I notice the linguistically thinking that I do and maybe I don’t notice the other kinds, but this felt different, it felt a cognitive operation but not a linguistic operation, and what was interesting for me … I came back and was then looking at cognition and I don’t think I had really understood the breadth of what cognition refers to and so much of this experience was reverberating with some of the non-linguistic dimensions of cognition which actually I do not really, necessarily, bring awareness to in my own experience, because linguistic cognition is so foregrounded. So I suppose what I am saying is that there were two things in my encounter with the stone, one was, or might be, a kind of linguistic manifestation that comes from that first, that follows the impulse of the material encounter with the stone into language, rather than it being about grasping it, but the other, was more like that there were very particular insights that seemed to arise around, in a way, different species of cognition, that really came to the fore, through the encounter with the stone. But this feels slightly different as a mode of thinking to what you were describing. So yes, I was coming back to this question am I really thinking with the stone, or am I thinking about the stone; thinking about the stone and not really thinking with it. I am curious about this, what it means to think with the stone. What I mean with that, I mean I had a mentoring session yesterday and these thoughts came up there, I think that the aboutness, I mean, I would like to make a distinction between aesthetic acting or aesthetic cognition and acting in a certain medium. I think that there is a tendency to think that aesthetic, it is related to a certain medium, I don’t think so. I completely separate both things. So aesthetic acting or aesthetic thinking for me is defined by a way of acting, by a disposition, and this can be realized in whatever medium. Nevertheless, the medium of course, changes the way we act, so there are things that are possible or easier, or impossible or more difficult, in one medium or the other. Then I think, for example, this form of relation we referred to with this aboutness, I think that this is very easy to be realised in language. Whereas this withness mode might be easier in the medium of a touching body. But I don’t think that it is exclusive. This is actually the condition of possibility of what I said before, I think this withness mode is also possible with language. With of course, with a certain mobilization of this medium, language. This must not be aimed at creating a discourse. Yes. I think that poetry is a rather withness mode – I mean writing or reading poetry – is a withness mode of mobilizing language. Let’s say, even if we would accept that poetry, a piece of poetry, would be thematizing something, I don’t know, I say something, love, or a stone, then we could agree in a certain way that it is about the stone, I think that the relation there will not be a relation of aboutness. But rather of making possible a certain way of relation with this issue, which I consider as touching. In terms of becoming in touch, or being in contact with, and I don’t think that this can be named as about. What if I let words arise out of the experience? I am just wondering. Instead of trying to grasp the experience out of words. I did not hear the last words. Can you hear me. I resonate very much with what you are saying. I actually had the impulse the whole time to jump into this withness, I feel very drawn to the withness with the stone actually. I was just wondering right now, what is the information, and our relation to information. When I hear you talking then this is also for me this moment of finding information, or more information, or what is the higher context, the context of the stone, where does it comes from, where does it go, what is it?  The questions – what can it tell me? So it is very interesting for me to listen to your language, your forming the words, and also the way you were expressing the word stone, how does it sound when I say, and you were explaining that it kind of gets stuck. There is this quality or the forming of the sounding while talking, and I kind of feel as if being present right now here with you, interacting with the thoughts and at the same time there is this stone in front of me, and I am also wondering, what is its presence there? And I really wonder what is this mouth and this tongue forming? And then relating to that stone is for me, the stone is so concrete, so materialized and so dense, in a way; and when I sense sometimes language can sometimes be very dense and very materialized, and there is a kind of quality of materializing terms or content. I am just meandering right now with my thoughts – what does it mean to speak, what does it mean to feel the sound of thought while I talk and my breath, doe the arise actually, does it arise some place in my body or it is some place up here, and then the thoughts starting to become words. I am feeling, I want to play with that … thinking of, thinking, forming, breathing, embodying, the relation, my relation, touch, tongue, and then there is this stone. Stone. Stone. I am just wondering the word stone, the tongue and the stone, I am wondering if the word stone has a similar, stone and stein in German, if it has a similar way of being, this like condensed. In German I have the feeling it is, the word really fits to the, to this materiality of the stone, and especially the experience I had made with it now, because it was very different to when I had it alone with me, it is very different this experience now than to working with it, playing with it, experimenting with it when I was alone. But now it has this, very much this mute quality of presence, a material physical presence which was shaping, somehow it is shaping … I started to think, I would be interested to see the stone and how the language shapes the way that I am or how I am acting, or how I am present in a way. The presence of this, how does it shape my presence? And of course it is not objective presence that is shaping each other but it is somehow an engrained process. So what does this, I was wondering now, what did the stone make me be? When, through the way that you guided my relation to it. And the same happens with the language, now speaking, the spoken language, and there was also, freely associating and getting back to some things that were triggered by listening to you, funnily enough the stone now was for me a complete mute object, I mean object, it was a mute thing. I had no, no relation to sound. To sounding. But before when I took it the first time in my hand I realized it has a very particular sound in the way that I can touch it. And I think I was never looking at the stone, actually. Not now and not before, I was never looking at an object, but rather … I cannot continue that thought. I think when I was saying looking, I was thinking … I am doing some training at the moment in awareness centred deep listening and I was trying to bring this practice to the stone. Because you can listen to someone who is silent and I was trying to bring that attitude of listening to the stone as well. So by looking, I was listening, it was in my visual sphere, but it was more about trying to activate a listening relationship to the stone. Listening to the muteness, I experienced the sense of muteness, no, maybe not muteness, because muteness seems to be so determined by language and it was not silent.  

I can start with something. And even now looking, continuing to look at the two lines, and I don’t know what lines you have actually. I think that there is some secret. Somehow for me, something happened that has to do with the, I had this feeling, still I, am having the feeling  ... the lines, the word spaciousness stuck in my mind probably and relating to that, like the lines relate to each other somehow, something of a three-dimensional space appeared and is still appearing. The way that you made me look at one line, trying to look at the other line in the same moment, something of a thing, almost as if the line started to move and then spaciousness then appeared or something of a space, maybe not spaciousness, space appeared, it became spacious. And maybe three-dimensionalistic, it was not the line, there were not two lines for me anymore, they are still not lines for me, so it stays the feeling that there is somehow space appears, maybe not three-dimensionality, but space and three-dimensional spaces within that space, but in general, space. And movement even – it became very moving and is still …For me it was also very interesting to observe the border of the paper, or the territory of the paper in a way, and what you are talking about, the continuity of space or where is the space actually happening, and I also had this impression of continuity of, as well space as and the objects, the paper was just a reference for what was continuing in the three-dimensionality for me as well, or maybe also embodying, I don’t know if this is the right thing, but there for me definitely was an experience which was much wider than the field of the paper. And I, I was also thinking about what is material, I mean, what is material? The stone material is resonating in a way, because, and this is so different for me, a note or a moment that could lead to anything, and it is this moment of becoming, it can be, and yet there is already, as if the recipe is already there. It is also for me, it was very interesting to look at the practice, I found it very beautiful in a way that we were invited by the practice to look first at one while already using this, the range of the sight already to include or integrate the other what is there, but focusing, having the focus like a torchlight on one, but at the same time realising that there is the other, and this is coming together. And also realizing that underneath or the even bigger space, spaciousness that is including all, and this expanded very much in my … while observing this and I found it very interesting, how big it can expand. Even endless, in a way. And then there is just this piece of paper in front of me with two lines on it. Actually, I have forgotten which lines I sent. I think I took a photograph somewhere. And I also found it interesting that there are appearing two lines but you do not know whether the line is in fact just one line in the end. Two ends that are showing. I mean in my drawing there are two lines but I thought maybe it is one line. Yes. So I – the experience of space just through a piece of paper is enough. I have no words for that actually. And also the space in between actually, when I read it, it was so logic, of course the space in between. Two things are placed, or I acknowledged them as two things, as being placed. But now it is really not about the space in between, I mean, how you were guiding us. I was struggling with the space in between because I was like what is the space in between? The space is there, and it is expanding. I had a feeling of it expanding, the space is expanding through going back and forth, to the lines, to one line and then to the other. But it was more space emerging maybe and then I am wondering, I don’t know, I am still wondering about space and spaciousness. Because space seems so un-concrete and abstract but then again also concrete. And it for me it is not concrete, it is more concrete in the sensation. But it is, because then I, I mean, I took in the whole space, the room I am in and how I was going back and forth from the lines into the wider environment of where I am and all the things, the stone, the table, the carpet, pieces that I can acknowledge as pieces and this feeling I had from the expansion of spaciousness from the lines actually travelled beyond the paper. And how that, I am wondering, again wondering how this spaciousness comes, this feeling of spaciousness comes through relating to a perception of how things are together somehow maybe. Things and how they are together, or how I perceive them as together, or not. I found it very different to engage with the drawings in this particular kind of way. As I have encountered them before, when I was encountering them before, because they came with the notes I was thinking a lot about the right and the left aspect of them, the right and the left hands. So thinking about the process of them being made. But here there was something very much to do with letting go of a sense of the history of their production to really focus on an encounter with what is perceptually there. It was interesting actually. The white of the paper was really lively – so it was flickery and lively, and there was a point where one of the lines completely disappeared. There was a kind of perceptual flashing and one line disappeared and then there was a moment where both lines disappeared. Which is quite amazing actually. This kind of lively lightness, a quality of lightness but within the materiality of the paper, was really striking. At one point my eye was really watering – there is a practice in the same tradition called trataka where you stare at something, and it is about bringing about the watering of the eye, and so it had a quality of the trataka practice. And then I felt I was drawn out of the experience towards reflecting on it, thinking about it in a different kind of way. One of the things that really strikes me is how out of practice my eyes are just in terms of the ocular muscles – it hurts to do this, it strains and I feel quite nauseous. I suppose I have been thinking about this sense of the sensori-motor aspect of aesthetic cognition and how, because my eyes are conditioned to operating in a certain way especially through so much screen work lately … how the narrowing of my ocular capacity narrows my perceptual capacity which narrows my cognitive capacity. It is very interesting actually … I have a yoga book that has a lot of eye exercises in it. Wow, I need to do those. I think of them as physical exercises to keep the eye health, but no, doing this exercise, it is not so much physical health but rather perceptual health, a cognitive health in a way. And I have not been thinking about, I have not been taking into consideration a sense of what comprises, what comprises, how perceptual capacity is strengthened or diminished by certain ways of using it. And this exercises shows that up quite strongly. The perceptual range that I am operating with quite often, again maybe this is a utilitarian range, an operative utilitarian range, it is so narrow, and to start exercising this. But this shimmer, the shimmering of it – this sense of giving time to something, giving time to something with a certain kind of engagement which I am not in the habit of doing. Again the flight of thought, a sense of when you notice it going into thought, does it really have to go into thought. Why can I not just stay with it? Why does thought get busy and excited? Can it not stay with? I guess it is the mind’s work, constantly. Or maybe I think at what cost. If I get busy with the thought, the excitement of thinking, the cost is that I am then exiting a different mode of engagement, or I am practicing one mode of engagement over another mode of engagement. Recognising what that habit does in terms of being open to the range of possibilities that experience brings. I am making a decision, I am making a decision to keep exiting one mode of encounter through preference of another mode of encounter. And that habit shapes my experience of the world – this is illuminating. For me the question of the frame was appearing. There were two framed lines. And someone can say this is obvious. It was not. There were two lines on a paper. Or maybe even two lines. And maybe this is also related to a question of information – which I relate to the question of the own features of something. We take for granted that they exist, we take for granted that there are own features of something, because we take for granted the reality of the something. So, or, because we think, in the paradigm of realism, and I think that this experience makes this paradigm absolutely impossible. I mean, not impossible, but not as solid as it seems to be, and it seems to be the most solid thing. And I believe less and less in this sense of extracting information, so I do much more believe or trust in being aware of experiences which is not about information but it is informing. So this is in terms of saying there is information here and I extract it, or no, information is being created in the sense of something coming to be and it is taking form, something is getting informed. So, somehow sequentially, after one another, both paradigms are possible, but not at the same time, they cannot coexist, so in this sense, yes, well making an ontology out of it. So, there were two lines and there were two framed lines – these are two different things. And the second was informed by this practice. And actually, other practices informed the first. I was referring to this artifact in a certain way that made me think about it, or made it appear to me. There were two lines and there were two framed lines. I was just thinking very practically I had the impulse at a certain moment to move the paper. I did move the paper. I had it in front of me lying on the table, and not touching it, and having it much more as an artifact, and then I moved it. And it was a bit like moving the hands before, the exercise, the moment when you … anyways, I mean, how do you modify the frame implicitly? Because I think I just did it, and then a shadow fell on it … I had it in my hand and it was not lying on the desk in front of me like this very respected piece of something, an artefact. And the shadow was falling, not directly but diffusing, so the light is changing actually on the paper and then some other like is coming from a different angle and it wasn’t even so much about the haptic of the paper, like feeling the haptic, but more like I had to move the lines maybe. Was I moving the lines, no I was not moving the lines, but I was moving the paper, let’s keep it there. And of course, it changes the frame that you set. Probably quite a lot without me noticing it. As you were talking there, I was reminded of the exercise that you asked us to do, where we were talking about the difference of the eye reaching, or maybe this is the same thing as we were talking about language, the difference between language grasping at something and trying to appropriate it, or the eye appropriating something, differently from letting it come, and actually I had not thought about this correspondence between language and the eye, this is maybe a nice way to hold it in mind. Letting language, letting … I cannot get it. Letting language receive, letting it come more. Yes, I think that there are these two movements of grasping or receiving, language can also work also like that. So I grasp the meaning through language and I write a definition – this would be like listening and looking instead of hearing and seeing. Whereas if I let words appear, without the intention of grasping something but rather creating, or reinforcing, or realizing an object of perception in language, this can also be the same. I mean, words, organized signs, organised graphic signs, sounds or images can be produced or emerge. They can be the result of self-centred, target-oriented, will-based actions or/and can be the result of a distributed field of agencies.  That is what I said, so for me, it is getting more and more clear – a mode or a variety of interaction and media, they are two different layers and they are not constitutive of each other, they coincide, and when they coincide in their realization of course they condition each other, but they are not constitutive of each other. And this is relevant for language, in terms of there is a variety of modes of interaction in the media of language, if we think that spoken language and written language are two different media. Both possibilities are there.

I was struggling with what I notice as, what I notated as, the constitution of this sphere. So it is like the beginning of the practice and for me this is an important foundational moment of this practice. Or the way I entered this practice. It begins also with an understanding of, or with an experience of the word in English of the German Nahbereich which for me not really fits. German word (see sabine score) … is very specific in German. And then I was like proximate sphere, or maybe I came to say the immediate sphere. So this is what resonates in terms of the sense in Nahbereich and immediate because it also relates to the question of how, how are my senses mobilized in order to constitute this sphere.  Because I think that this sphere is constituted through a certain mobilization of my senses. Meaning, how do I, so, what is the balance of senses, is there for example, is the visual sense remain being the dominant or is more tactile one, I even did not consider the olfactory or also not the sound one. So maybe there is a tactile … there was a dialectic between the tactile and the visual. And also in terms of visuality, so for me, it was a discovery of say well it depends on the inclination of my head. So if I go up, then I am opening this field of … no, sometimes we understand eyes, we perceive them as something projecting, this metaphors of projection, so like it is like the lights of a car, so you have to go down. You have to remind if you want to keep this there within my immediate sphere. And also in terms of I am able to touch, able to touch making a small movement, so all these questions are quite relative and undefined, So they must find a kind of a systemative attuning with one another. So how do I mobilise my visual sense, my tactile sense, and how do I do this in moving. I think that maybe because the time I focused this practice on this what I call constitution of the … what I liked was immediate sphere. In terms of I can reach it, whatever it is, in this sphere, immediately, in terms of without taking, without needing to, to, to, make a connection in between. So it is like if I see something I have to go there, so there is something in between my intention and me achieving this goal. So this would not be immediate. This is what I like about immediacy to express in English what Nahbereich means for me. I found the beginning of the practice again - similar to my experience from before - an interesting challenge, something to do with the transition into a practice, which takes me some time actually. To begin with there is something of a sense of deficit that comes, the deficit of my habitual way of being or how is this unlike me normal habits. So to begin with there is this threshold of rubbing up against habits of being in the world, I think in terms of immediately walking out of my house, in the sense of there are certain habits and patterns that come with that. I think that there is some kind of confrontation, almost in a sense of the automatic way I might move as I directly cross through the door into a bigger space. It is so automatic, it is the confrontation with the shock of that in a way, this is interesting. And then, something to do with, a whole period which was to do with the confrontation with the shock of certain habits … that ordinarily I would have a sense of where I am going. It would not be, it would not be at the level of the impulse of the proximate sphere, it would be more that I know that I am going for a walk around the park or I know, it is a hybrid of pre-planning and automatic habits, and I suppose that I am holding this idea of aesthetic thinking lightly in mind, and thinking how is this mode different? And then as I was moving outside, again, to begin with I found the stillness, the tuning in really necessary for my own practice. I could do this for a lot longer. It feels very necessary for me. Again there was something of a dropping in, it was a vertical register, it was a dropping in, a dropping into the world in a sense. But then there was something interesting that happened in that I can’t get out of that almost, and I don’t know whether it was to do with the focus on the proximate sphere as being something to do with the extremities of the body. It is almost like my attentional threshold was at the limit the body but within the body, and not … it was self-contained. I felt like an egg really, where the proximate edge of the body felt almost quite enclosing. So it was almost like I couldn’t discern, or couldn’t tap into an impulse to move, there was no reason to move almost. Maybe the impulse to move usually comes from a further away impulse, especially in terms of sight and hearing. I could hear the birds and I could see things, but no, it had to be within the reach of the arm. And as I came within the reach of the arm, I got stuck there. I could not tap into any curiosity to move somehow. One thing that was interesting actually, was as I was walking out there is a lot of redcurrant flower in season here - it is very pungent, a very pungent smell. And I like to take this off the bush and smell it. This was very nice - the smell suddenly activated a really different kind of stillness, a much less self-conscious stillness. I would hold the blossom to my nose and to begin with it was just nice just standing there and smelling it, but then to move with that, it was a very different kind of movement actually. I didn’t feel any pull to look further, my area of interest was much more close to my body but what was interesting was it was not introspective. So it stayed local to the body, very proximate to the body, but there was no tendency – which I can certainly have – to introspect. It stayed near, but not going into. I was also taking, while going down the stairs, I thought OK where do I go. I decided to stay where I am, and that was interesting because I stood in a kind of tunnel and then I also have this, this, I also had this question of how much is movement needed. It was not about, it was also sensing the movement already happening and by doing these really tiny shifts there were unfolding so many options so it was almost overwhelming to have all these options of coming into and realizing these moments of different light coming to my body. But I did not only realize it with my eyes I also realized it with my hands and with the front and the back and the sides. So the directions of things, I could also not move because of so many options in a way. Actually I am quite overwhelmed by all this density – I almost cannot find any words for now, I feel … what came to me was very much the sounding of things, and I could realize that the sounding of my breath would extend the proximate sphere or the moment, it kind of related to another dimension and this was really interesting to observe that, the sounding of the things and even the things that I cannot hear directly, kind of adapted to that sounding. The sounding was … and I was also questioning myself, where is my interest going? I mean, what is the, what do I follow and where does it come from? Listening to you, I noticed that aurality, so sound, listening, was not active at all, or if I recall the experience it was automatically situated outside of my what you call the attentional threshold and what I like to call the immediate sphere. There were these kids running on the side and I was like no, I didn’t attend. I mean I notice but I didn’t attend to that because I think, without making the decision, I situated sound outside this sphere, as not belonging to this sphere. I guess if there was something in the sphere which was mainly defined by visual perception and also in a second moment with my tactile perception, if it would have sound there then I would not have rejected it. It was not a categorical rejection of listening or hearing but everything that was activated in listening or hearing was outside of this sphere, and for this reason, discounted. I am trying to explain something, I mean it is a posterior explanation. It is me explaining now, an explanation of what I experienced. Can you say it in other words again? I mean you both were referring to the presence of aural objects or aural perceptions, and listening to you I noticed that on the one hand I was hearing them, there were sounds there - my memory of the experience is not without sounds but I situated these sounds outside of the immediate sphere, the sphere I was trying to keep and to protect. So sound was not part of it. It was around it, but not part of it. Interesting. And I imagined sound being part of it. Because if I recall what I have seen or what I have touched, there were things there that could have sounded. And then, I think, I guess I would not have excluded. Do you think, I wonder, I am departing now from my direct experiences but I am wondering whether … how to say it, that sound is present but rather than … a bit like what we were talking about in the sense of the difference between the eyes reaching towards something or receiving … I wonder whether the sound can be present but not in a reaching way. So there are the boys making the noise, which is over there, but there is still also a … is there something about the proximate experience of that would be much more at the level of the organ of the ear. So it would be present in the reception and not so much tethered to the object of the sound somehow. There was a nice moment on the walk that I was doing where the sun touched me, so it wasn’t so much that I was seeing the sun … though this is mixing the metaphors in a way, something to do with the feeling of something, something about the felt sensation of sound within the proximate sphere might still include sounds originating elsewhere but there is the registering of them, like the reverberation of them within the proximate sphere. I am speculating though, this was not in my experience. I think it was to do with, what I can recognize in my experience, is that somehow this immediate sphere or this attentional sphere was there, it had a kind of crispy edge. Like the egg, it was like the eggshell. I feel that what I was not noticing so much was the density of experience within the proximate sphere, so it stayed at the limit edge of the proximate sphere, so there was a moment where I was rubbing together my finger and my thumb and it felt that it was at these extremities where it was most attended to or kind of the place where air was touching my skin. So the skin, the skin experience of the body felt important, or dominant, it did not feel important, it felt dominant. But I think as a consequence, it is almost like the depth of the attention was a bit limited in my own practicing of it. Neither was it going into a more interior sense of sensation nor was it really going much beyond that limit. What I was curious about was whether the sense of the proximate sphere has to be activated in my own experience much more as a zone with spatial thickness to include more of the interior experiences of the body but might almost fluctuate beyond the limit of the body’s proximate sphere. It felt like that edge might have to shimmer a bit more really, to create a relationship really to the environment. It felt a bit hermetic at times. I think what you are touching upon is that, referring to sound is this where is the sound. There is a distinction - that is made in the history of sound - between the sound object and the sound body. So, what is producing, no, not what is producing, but what is creating the object, the conditions for the sound to be, what is the vibrating body, and where is the sound, which is not the same but we tend to say they are the same. It happens actually the same with the visual but it is more tricky to think in these terms. But the point is that we see not so much resonances as reflections. But of course we are not aware of it. The moment you said the sound touched me, there is a shift. There is a shift towards the sound object not the sound body, not what vibrates but what you called the interior, which I tend to understand as my experience of sound. Sound as my experience, like when the light touched me. Is this because of a moment when I really feel warm, for example, or is it something else. I think that this question seems to me absolutely relevant for the constitution of this sphere. Because this apparently clear distinction between senses of proximity or of distance is not so clear,if we think about it in these terms. So I mean, the question would be what is the sound and what is the image? So we don’t have in these two, these two are not equivalent somehow but we do not have words for the other senses that are similar to that so there is a collapse from image to sound. I always have to think now of the localization of the sound now, where is the local point, where is this local area? And, and, you have been talking before that you did not feel somehow internal or somehow external, you were explaining it different. I also found this interesting, this transition between inner and outer because it is not about being internal closed-up but it is something that is starting to relate, or letting the relation happening, or letting the connection happening. What you were explaining, you could not, we became aware of the sound but it was more outside of your immediate sphere, you were talking about this immediate sphere. So when is this moment that something is coming into this local … and with what actually, is it, what is this becoming aware of, coming connecting with, getting in touch with? What is this moment of happening where … where do I shift then, and where is the shift happening? And to what, I mean its … Yeah, but I mean, this, this shift, in this case, is very specific and I think this specificity is what makes for me, no, I mean when I am aware of something, but there is something more in this case, as, but I say, as belonging to my immediate sphere. Because if the question is whether am I aware it is another question, much wider. I was aware of these kids. Visually, in terms of sound, even maybe in terms of maybe my judgments about it. So no, there are different forms of presence of these kids. But the point is they were not present as belonging to or constituting my immediate sphere. I think that this is the specificity of this practice. So, in my attempt to maybe name or even categorise practices using continuous forms of practice of blahblahblah-ing, I was thinking maybe this is a practice of localizing proximity or delineating proximity, constituting proximity. I think, I think this one part of the practice, but it is not all. I think it is constituting … but it was not my intention to only focus on that. I became focused on that but I think it is only the first part of the practice. Once it is constituted, then there is another part of this practice. I think that this practice has two focuses and the first focus is a condition for the second: the constitution of this proximate sphere is a condition, in terms of once you are there, then, there is a shift that is maintained, no, then the focus shifts to another one, which is also what you were mentioning with the resonances or this other possible spheres of action. These happen in this sphere of proximity. It would be interesting to say now we change this to a medium distance, or far distance, it would be also possible in terms of establishing as you said, attentional thresholds or spheres. But then there is a second point, I think. I was just thinking now in the sense of what, let me think, the sense of, what am I thinking, there is something to do with I think, that I wasn’t quite able to dissolve the sense of the representational idea of the proximate sphere. While ever it existed as a kind of representation for me, what it strengthened was a sense of ‘me’, the egg of ‘me’ somehow. This is where the movement was harder, it was something to do with the representational idea of the sphere was somehow creating a sense of containment or withdrawal from the environment, almost like a barrier in some respects … when that edge was rendered more porous, or where the representation collapsed I think was where something was present within the proximate sphere that wasn’t me. The scent of the blossom. This was within my proximate sphere but not what I might call ‘me’. I think that there was something there to do with the collapse between what I am perceiving as external things in the world and what I am conceiving as myself. And there were a few moments in that experience where the edge was much more soft, but overall the experience, because I was holding onto this representational view of the proximate sphere rather than really letting myself feel it somehow … I was starting to think how might in be to come out of this, only in the beyond of the proximate sphere, disembodied really. I do not know where I am going with this, thinking about the way in which through a felt experience there was this breakdown in the classification of what is ‘my’ proximate sphere and in fact, that this is comprised of other things, other agencies. That is not coming out very well, but … I mean I couldn’t avoid to relate this to the conversation we have with our colleagues about the presence of the “I” in phenomenology. And I think, I have been thinking about that also when I was teaching, and I think that acting aesthetically, the “I” becomes a medium. For example, in this way that we are working clearly with perception, and when we know that perception, well, at least according to certain phenomenological points – which might be very criticized now in all this sorry, fashion, of new materialism, where it seems like a magic act of making subjectivity disappearing from the world – but when I perceive, it cannot be me who is perceiving and then there is a point, there is a point, no, there is a point, which is the origin of perspective which I think is unavoidable in perception. So, but, saying that, which applies I perceive around me, because I perceive from this point … I can imagine that I perceive from somewhere else but this would be imagination. This ‘I’ is not an egocentric ‘I’ – it opens up, it becomes for me a medium to define this sphere, and for me, what is relevant in the act of perceiving, what is in my experience, is this sphere which needs me as a point in the world to be defined but this ‘me as a point in the world’ is not the focus of my attention but this sphere needs operatively this point in the world to exist. But it is not egocentric. I wasn’t appearing. And I think in aesthetic experience there is a kind of this paradox, which is not, but it seems to be a paradox, that there is a hyper-activation of subjectivity, but subjectivity as egocentric experience disappears. I disappear in the moment that I am more active and more important, because of this subjectivity. I would say that aesthetic actions is, so, implies a nonegocentric use or mobilization of subjectivity. It is through me, but I do not appear.

I think that one of the things that I am noticing now coming back down to sitting, here, is something to do with a kind of momentum between a grounding experience, a settling experience, and then some of the practices had an agitating feeling in a sense, stirring in a sense really, even a bit excitable. And that movement between certain sense of, calming is not the right word, but a coming into a sense of stilling, and then, a sort of more agitated, is not the right word. Like frothy or something, like in the experience of writing, there were moments of frothiness and in the last practice, and then coming back to a stiller sense. I mean, I was now going back to the tuning in even and I think I had, something happened in the tuning, that I felt was similar to what I felt as the first moment, which is always the same for me, funnily enough. The moment of starting the proximity practice it always for me an excitement that happens on a very subtle, but very present in a way. And the word that is coming to me again is somehow … yes, well, the word that is coming is actualizing. Somehow I had the feeling that the excitement starts to happen both when there are possibilities that I don’t know, are actualized, or, I don’t know if this is the right English word to be honest, aktualisiert. And I felt similarly, not so much on the tuning in but also there is a sense of space or of place, I never really know well to distinguish both. I have not really made up my mind – maybe it is more place, like a place-ness. Almost as if, something in between, a space becomes a place and this is an exciting feeling. And then different processes start. But then is, I am quite happy that I realize it appearing in the tuning, already in the very beginning. That is how through the combination of circumstances, conditions, and our special situation to receive or to be able to work with something. Yes, that actualizes, I mean, I couldn’t really say yet what it is. But it is something, and it is immediate. It is not something that is projected, or that comes from a projection. It is really something that grounds in the same way. That is why I followed your thoughts, that is how I followed your thoughts. For me this has both a feeling of a verticality but from that maybe more like this than like this, or like this. Like a steam or something, it starts to steam up and thickens. And to sense these, I mean, through the actions, through the beginning I got more aware of this moment, because I take it for granted usually in a way. It is something I go through but I never pay attention to it. Today I sense very much this relation between the moment to receive something and what is it, and the moment where I actively move into, and I am wondering for me there is also a difference between this just be and receive, and at the same time, when to do an active movement. And today I felt, especially when I went out, to do the proximity score I actively walked and I could sense the relation by walking or by sensing the quality of thoughts changing, and I also related to yesterday I cannot verbalise. I realize this relation to language, or how to express the sensation – what do I sense, and where does the sensation start and where is it expressed, and what is thinking actually? I could relate very much the pace or speed of the thoughts whereas yesterday I almost couldn’t move, I had so many thoughts going on. And today, I had to move to form the thoughts differently. I also think about my relation to thoughts the whole time. I could not write at all. I was just reading and then by reading, thinking and observing the thoughts, and observe them first as a thought, just a simple thought. But then I also question how has the emotion evolved into a thought, or is there an emotional level, or is the thought a different … can the thought be, like when I am talking now, I do not go into that level of emotionality, like the excitement, so I realize that there are different levels of thoughts that connect in a specific form or that show up in a specific form with different qualities, with a different pace, with different … and I was thinking about that word expression and also the pressure, something has to become and come into life and come into a form. And there definitely for me there is a connection between this grounding aspect, this, and I can sense these two kind of perspectives, of encountering from different angles, the one is to open and let it be or what is the allowance of something, that is something that I was also thinking. What do I allow to be? What do I allow to happen? Do I decide to allow or is it just happening? And by becoming aware of it I allow for, and so I while writing, while you were writing I could physically feel somehow, it was an interesting observation for me to be physically present, while the writing is happening and also seeing this interweavingof movement, of the written text, and it was for me as if I would feel the sensation that you were talking about physically in my body. What does it mean to hold back or so I was, I can sense this net of physicality just being yet at the same time there is layers of different thoughts happening, different languages, different. And I was also thinking about the timing of being informed, being informed and what does it mean when I get information, then I need to kind of digest the information, and what does it mean for me? For me, for myself, then I realize that I need time to digest until it is transformed or integrated, the integration of information. And that this needs time, for me. My experience of the proximate score was very different to yesterday. It is interesting, I wonder whether, how much that might be to do with the writing preceding it, because in a way I suppose, the kind of environment that one feels easy in, or at ease, not easy but more ease, there is somehow a fluidity in a textural space, a textorium really, that I don’t always feel in a physical sense. It was interesting this movement from on a page to movement in space, this direction felt that it actually enabled a kind of fluidity. It wasn’t a kind of linguistic sensibility carrying on into the proximate sphere but it felt that it created a kind of fluidity. The score itself, I went to the park. I had to make a decision. I didn’t do the score to begin with, but got to where I wanted to be and then this is an interesting question about the continuity and discontinuity between the practices. The park was interesting because it is on a very steep gradient, so there were things that I was reflecting on, no that I was experiencing, that was enabling me to stay within the proximate sphere. One of them was the softness of the ground, rather than the pavement, something about this unevenness, this aliveness of the floor even. But the gradient of the hill that I was walking, not even walking, moving over, meant that I was not taking a straight path. I had come off the path basically, yesterday most of my movements were on a path. So there is something about this ‘off path’. And then because it is super steep I was drifting from side to side, and then what emerged didn’t emerge in any way yesterday, was something to do with exploration of the centre of gravity. Already to move up the hill my centre of gravity was tilted, or my body was more of a diagonal to cope with the hill, and this took me straight to the floor. There was something that was much more possible therebetween the relation between standing and moving the ground, and crouching and touching the floor with my hands. Sitting, even lying. There was somehow a range of physical movements that became more possible, that become very fluid, the line between these different modes was subtle. Especially between standing to crouching to touching the floor. I am interested in the proximate sphere as it got closer to the floor, and whether it stays evenly arm-distance in all directions, or whether it goes under the floor, it seemed as if it flattened as I came closer to the floor. But there was something to do with shifting a sense of gravity and shifting the head, the lowering that I found very interesting to think about in terms of thinking really, how it effects the quality of thinking? Then I reflected that my capacity for access into a space of aesthetic action feels so contingent on certain external circumstance – like the green space of the park. I know this because I use it as a space for walking when I am thinking. But seasonally and weather-wise, you know, just being able to go to the floor – this feels contingent on much bigger agencies. The quality of the wind, the quality of the light, the warmth, the weather, the season. And I also know this in my own working patterns as well. There is a coming alive in the moment that creates conditions for thinking somehow. The aspect of releasing and at the same time arising for me is very immanent into grounding. So there is always a release into and something that is uprising. I was just wondering picking up on how thinking becomes differently possible within different circumstances and what physical movement, what multidirectional physical movement does with it. Because I had a moment where I got stuck within the proximity score, it was more of a theoretical question, I mean theoretical in the sense that I could really say the question in the moment, which was how can I move on in terms of walking and take the, and move as I told to you, to move the proximity sphere with me, and I started to think that this is the wrong, it is not an adequate formulation, but still I kept with it and I got stuck. It didn’t move on, and then I realize that what I do in those situations usually is that I completely let go of the score. Everything. And I continued to move and then something happens and then this release through movement, it is a not projected movement let’s say, and then in the moment, I do it very intuitively, very often, and this is what I forget to tell in the score, this is an important part, to completely let go. And then something else comes back.  I think it is a coupling of letting go of an idea and in that moment a question, that I was thinking but maybe for sure not aesthetically thinking, but then through the physical, I think different kinds of physical processes, a different kind of thoughtful thinking action process starts and it couples back to an immediate … in that moment I let go, I continue with some movement and all of a sudden the immediateness of the sphere and some sensuous qualities that I dismissed when I was thinking about this specific question came back and it started to fall into place, no it didn’t start to fall in place, this is the wrong terminology, but something coupled differently again and started to make sense. And I was wondering a little bit, what are the deviations from the score, what are … another deviations I realised was how to wander off into the distance with my eyes, into the long distance and then come back and stay with the proximity even though I am leaving it. Maybe somehow the deviations also, strengthen what you are deviating away from. The question is, one possible question, what I heard you were saying is how much a score is understood as a system of rules of the game. If I compare it to a sport, there are certain rules. So if you play football you cannot touch the ball with the hands. These are the rules of the game. My question is how much the score works like that? Because there is no possible deviation of not touching the ball with the hands and the sense of this non-possible deviation is to play the game. So in games there is this paradox, of constraint in the negative sense as limitation and enabling. Because I have this set of rules which are limitations, means I cannot do. And basically a game is defined basically by things you cannot do. The game is allowed, it is enabled, it is possible, and my question in this regard is how to relate this idea of the game, I do not know if they are right but they feel right to me, to the score. SO in terms of saying, no I am not doing now this has a sense of bell of attention, I have to go back, I am outside of the practice, so I am outside of the game. I don’t know – it is a possibility. To understand the operability or the agency or simply to understand the or a score. In terms of no deviation but deviations happens. You find yourself outside of the score, which I do not recognize as proximity score, my sphere of proximity. So my tendency is to say, so my tendency is to doubt my words – one is to say now today I was focusing on sound again, because of how we were talking yesterday. No this is not, this does not belong to my sphere of proximity, I notice it and noticing this, I take this as a basis for saying go back to your sphere of proximity and maybe then I can open a field of considerations about why is this not part of it, of my sphere of proximity. Or in my case today what does the sound need to be part of my sphere of proximity and more precisely does the sound need something else than only being produced by what I only visually define or outline as my sphere of proximity, because this was the case, there was the sound of the music coming from a bar, it was a kiosk and there was music coming from there which was visually not what I was considering to be my sphere of proximity but which I accepted as belonging to this, and right after a bell of a clock which was farther away sounded and I was not sure about feeling it, how are my feelings of this sound belonging or not to my sphere of proximity. So all these thoughts happen in the field of a possible violation of the rules of the score. This actually means that I accept it, these rules. Then I come back to the sense of score as a set of rules, which actually was my first thought when I write the first score of the exploratory writing. When I wrote – not do that, not do that, not do that. Which is not nice. No. But no-one would say it is not nice when you play football if you say that you cannot touch the ball. It is not nice. No. It is what allows you to play football. So, yes, I cannot then, I cannot, I cannot, if I understand the score in terms of a game, of the rules of a game or for a game then this rule of not touching the ball, it does not appear to me, or I would not judge it in terms of it feels nice or not, or it is good or not. No this is how the game is. Exactly, what comes in there is the question of at what level of the game does the score play?And I think that there is a difference between football and these kind of you know score is the field where the score takes place - it is congruent in a way. While at least in my case how I work with scores, they, I don’t know, I have never thought about this in that way, but I would almost say the score is a tool that co-constitutes something, but it is not the only one. And there are a lot of other conditions happening all the time – one is the weather, one is one’s self, that in order to or maybe I think it is different also with me, because this is not the one and only way. I think it has to do with is the score part of other conditions even other scores or is the score the only reality in a way, I mean the reality in which you place other realities inside. There are different conditions and they are extremely changing, and interchanging all the time … but still this is more of a, still everything else is placed inside it. I never used the word deviation before but there comes another deviation … what comes in, I don’t know. I am not saying that the rules of the game, for sure not. Actually when you play football, you don’t see the rules. You can say that they are always there. Referee is the one to whom, but the rules are there, but the rules are not the game. I never said that the rules are everything – the rules are actually a small part of it. And, but they have a specific function, in the system of the game, in the reality of the game, in the actualization of the game. It is not everything – there is also weather and the state of the grass, a game is also a piece of life, but it is a piece of life enabled in a particular way by the rules of the game. These conditions your habits and then you have to be able to inhabit the field of potentiality that the rules enable. What is coming to mind is the difference between play and games, I am going off the work on Roger Caillois on games and play and one of the differentiations is that in a game the rules have become more crystallised as a kind of organisational principle. But even if I think about football there must have been a moment in football’s evolution before the rules became concretised into the set of rules they are now when the rules were capable of being modified in the process of playing. At what place does the score function – is it that it precedes action, or it is evolving through action, or even that it retrospectively gives a sense of structure to what has been.

So I will start with something of a physical image – it is almost the only sketch I was drawing. It is a big belly, big fat belly of a man that obviously likes to eat and drink. And then it is a belly that through this, it happened towards the end of the exploration, that I could, I could pass this belly which was then part of my Nahbereich. I realize that there was a chain of things happening and for me this moment of the big belly, being able to, not my belly but being part of me in a certain sense of, in the sense of, I felt that exploring this time more than any other time I felt the proximate, the Nahbereich, I will continue to use the German word, the Nahbereich actually is … when it constitutes itself and as much as I can help it or curate it, curate it, that its happening, that it likewise stays with me in one way or another and it is actually something that supports my being with the place let’s say, or the space. Maybe it constitutes the space that allows me to be with the place. And with the dynamics and with the activities, also with … it allows me to slip both physically into places where I wouldn’t stay, I wouldn’t linger, I wouldn’t dwell. But it also allows me to dwell in places I would say even of … value systems or sensemaking systems. I can almost slip in between, I can allow myself to be there and explore further steps from there. It is not a direct chain but in the end it got back to this man, there are a lot of men hanging around here on the streets. Not so many women of course. And it kind of allowed me, I could pass by this guy and really have a physical sensation of OK, OK, that belly is part of my Nahbereich and my Nahbereich is very much intrinsically connected to whatever is myself. So there is I think something of support that happens in that zone, where one shifts into the other and it then it shifts away. This also allowed me at times to stay with my Nahbereich but actually look out onto the street. Or I realized that I was standing right across somebody else on the other side of the street, you know directions probably like city planners probably built as a line drawn on a map happened in space, but I was still in that time zone that allowed me to be there. So it was a really … and another word that came up was gentleness, because I felt this time, I think it is a lot of what I am trying to reach actually. But still something happened on the physical level of gentleness and allowing myself, being allowed – not even allowing myself. It is not so much of a negotiation with myself in the first place, I mean of course this, but it not the point some how. But it produced or constituted a gentleness of being there and also physically of joints, articulating themselves differently. So also on a physical level, it is great this word articulate, how it means to articulate and also as far as I think, it is joining, it is a joint that is getting articulated and it can articulate in different directions. It can maybe articulate different directions … because I also realize I was turning microscopically and that allowed me to move into those inbetween places or into … maybe they are not inbetween, maybe they are just places. But they are really … it is also a feeling of moving into things. It is a different kind of choosing. I am actually wondering about the quality of this moving into, continuously moving into places and then accepting in a way, accepting the big belly. It is there, it is what it is, it is there with me, here. And then there is another here, happening. Then, the belly is not part of it anymore. But I think also connected to the moving into, no, not connected to the moving into ... but there is something of a next thing, a next thing, a next thing. So, I think also in terms of attention, paying attention to the things that are within. I had to look a lot to the ground again, so I am wondering, in the city at least, is the ground the only thing that is surely within my Nahbereich. While everything else can go in and out. And the stains on the ground and how the ground is repaired, how it opens up or the signs that are on the ground in order for you to move in particular directions and how it breaks and doesn’t fulfill if you are with it closely. It doesn’t fulfill that role anymore. Now I lost my thread. I started with ground. I don’t know what. Anyways the ground kind of is something that stays, while the upright I think is to really practice. There is something of us being upright, topologically, we have our hands free - we can look into far away. It is a challenge I think. So starting from your image of meeting a big belly, you mentioned this physical image in your Nahbereich, in your proximate sphere. This big belly caused a chain of things and you realized that by accepting that big belly as being there, and becoming part of yourself, even though it was not your belly. So there was this process of acceptance in your realization of the Nahbereich, and this supported your being with the place with the different dynamics, and it allowed you to slip and dwell in value systems and explore other steps from there. And you realized that there was many men on the street, not women. To realize that this continuation of, from there you could expand your attention into further or wider zones. You were talking about lines and then came up the gentleness, the gentleness allowed you to be, or allowed the constitution of the gentleness, the constitution of gentleness allowed the being there, or the articulation of, in different directions that could continue after, through the gentleness.  Being gentle with yourself and being … so there was this feeling of moving into things one after another. A different kind of choosing, continuously moving. Accepting what is there to move on. We are talking about the disappearance of one thing. Exploration, exploring – this was the first word I looked. It was surprising. Exploring: ex – out; and plorare, to weep, to cry. Then I looked at between. But I didn’t finish – there is the first, the ‘be’ seems to be rooted in ‘by’ and I did not have time to look at the etymology of by and ‘tween’ seems to stem from tweonum, two each. So I cannot, I would need more times to relate both parts – the ‘by’ and the ‘tweonum’. It is not Latin in this case. Then I had time to go for another, which was for me also interesting. Gentleness. Which comes from gentilis – from the same family or clan; and from gene to give birth. So, yes. So to explore with gentleness could be an interesting combination. To crying, giving birth in the same family or something like that, or belonging to, or giving yourself birth to your own family. Speaker becomes the Etymologist. Etymologist becomes the Listener. Listener becomes the Mirror. Mirror becomes the Speaker. Today I came up with the thought before we started – how to choose again? And there I also had this, well maybe a similar moment – I want to find a comfortable place for myself and so I straightly went there, where I went comfortable. So this was a place outside, nearby, not to walk too much. So I had to take care of this moment of how do I feel comfortable and there I realized aspects of being orientated and being disorientated. And I was wondering if there is in the planning of, is there aspects of orientation that means I plan or I know or I ... that include, that definitely includes a specific knowledge of, knowing what I need to do now. But then while being with my proximate sphere, or shift my attention to my proximate sphere I noticed moments of disorientation. And I appreciate these moments of being disoriented because I realized that only in these inbetween zones of being orientated and being disorientated, there are movements happening. And I could realize a kind of stretching out in different levels of the Nahbereich, so I could sense different distances of Nahbereich while using either sight or my auditory awareness or my senses, touching skin, these, there was a lot of differences in the qualities as well. And, as well as realized there was my need, for example, I needed to sit down. And this also came up and navigated me into a different kind of Nahbereich, or away from a Nahbereich that happened before. So there was also this shift between focusing the environment or the influence and imprints of the environment of myself on different levels but at the same time then realizing needs from the inside that also influenced the Nahbereich where I was actually. And I could sense very well the different temperatures, the temperature of the sun and then I also realized that there is a different temperature … I like this sense of temperature in terms of quality and also in terms of what makes me move. And I realized that warmth makes me move further on, it stimulates my curiosity when I feel warmth and maybe there is also a connection in feeling comfortable when it is warm. But at the same time a more colder temperature also pauses, or interrelates with a different kind of movement. And I like this range, this diversity – this range of temperatures that happened. And then I was also observing these different kinds of proximate sphere and I realized that one proximate sphere is interrelating or interacting with another by reaching into or reaching out of – there were these two qualities. This I could also sense physically – there is something that reaches out and I also realized that there are different zones in my body that relate differently to the proximate sphere.Either they are more reaching out areas, and others are more perceiving and, perceiving, the letting in or welcoming. Yes. So there was this spatial aspect of these transitional zones in a way of a quality of temperature, that always came back to this quality of temperature and then also observing and discovering different kinds of temperature in the surface with different kinds of … So one of the preconditions for exploring the Nahbereich was establishing a sense of comfort, or finding a place where it was possible to be comfortable. And once that sense of comfort had been established, what seemed to emerge was this interplay between a sense of orientation and a sense of disorientation. And it seemed that it was in the movement between orientation and disorientation, that the movement of curiosity began to arise in a way. So this shifting of attention, no maybe not shift of attention, shift of sensation between the orienting and the disorienting. And this sense of the Nahbereich not having a consistent contour but through the different senses this sense of modulation or variation between the edge of the Nahbereich – at times reaching further, at times feeling more proximate. And this was talked about later in terms of these different zones or even different qualities – there were parts of the body that felt as if they had more of a quality of reaching out towards a sense of external world if you like, and others which were more in the key of perceiving or letting in experience. So something .. the Nahbereich was not consistent but there was this range of experience happening within it. And then something to do with, again this interplay of two different forces. Here not so much to do with the interplay of orientation and disorientation but between the influence or pull of the environment and internal needs. And the dynamic or the navigation or the negotiation that was happening between these forces.So, I looked up first comfortable – comfortable comes from confortable- its Latin, it arrived in English through the French origin. Comfort from the Dutch, meaning mental and spiritual wellbeing but it is also connected to something cheerful, offering physical comfort. In another way, in another time, it was also used as a tranquil enjoyment. The word – com obviously comes from with, so it is Latin; and fortis coming from strong. So it is something with strength, connected to strength, to support you through strength. Then I looked up orientation – orientation found its way into being through the word orient, that has to do with the compass and the different direction of the compass. It is an arrangement the compass, and the orient as an arrangement to face east or any other specific direction. So orienting is a process of determining points of the compass, therefore of determining one’s own mental bearings. I looked up orient itself – firstly it is originally a word that is attributed to the South East of Europe, so there is a very clear focus from a central European perspective. But in Latin the origin in the rising sun, that is why it is south east from our perspective. So how to get it together. Speaker becomes the Etymologist. Etymologist becomes the Listener. Listener becomes the Mirror. Mirror becomes the Speaker. I was wanting, I had an urge to find a place, to go to a place to begin. It is a couple of minutes away, a park space. I think that this is to do with the neighbourhood, the residential neighbourhood, feels so overwhelming somehow, it feels very difficult to get in touch with the Nahbereich, because the habits and forces of nearby things is super strong. Maybe I was already thinking this is not a good thing, maybe I should try the neighbourhood. But anyway, I was in the park. And, I find it challenging to settle into the investigation in many respects, it is also as if there are so many possibilities I cannot settle, like an overwhelm of different calls or possibilities. Then I realize that this is not so much the case, it is I don’t necessarily – the impulse to move, the impulse of curiosity does not necessarily come from the matter of the body somehow.That if I … or rather the impulse to move does not really come from movement, or physical movement it seems. There is no, or there is little, momentum that arises from movement giving rise to movement. What I noticed was that I almost needed, no I found, certain kinds of micro-movements or other kinds of movements facilitated my movements. So what I was noticing to begin with was when I was looking, there was this kind of shimmering on my retina I guess, almost pixilated. And then from there, I noticed those floating shapes that you get on the surface of the eye – and I became interested in this as the proximate sphere, or as the edge of the body in a way. Just that sense of looking, but everything beyond the surface of my eye was blurred and all I can see the surface of my eye. So it is like the eye seeing itself somehow. And I think from there, I was almost like using the impulse of the movement of these floating phenomenon on my eye to take me in certain directions. So starting with this very micro-movement as something moved to follow that– so the movement of the head that was following a movement that was in myself but also not me,these things on the surface of my eye were calling me to move. And I think I was also moving in and out of the direct experience – I find that the movement away, where do my thoughts go, they wander into reflection quite often. Reflecting on the experience rather than being in the experience. Some of this reflection was on … my training is really in lens-based practice and time-based practice … so I think that there is something to do with optics and light that my own training as nurtured. So in the investigation it is often the call of light in some capacity that is drawing me. And this led on to an investigation of the shadow. I was reflecting, trying to work out, does my shadow comprise my proximate sphere or not. Because it is definitely in touch with me, but beyond the physical extension of my body. So I was doing some movements where I was trying to bring my shadow within the physical space of my proximate sphere, but this was not possible, because every time I moved the interplay of the sun, and my body and the shadow. As I move closer it kept moving away and as I was trying to reach towards it, it moves away. So there is this play of distance with the shadow. But something to do with trying to touch the limit of the shadow, this was also producing movementand I found that very interesting – there is a movement that was emerging out of necessity through an investigation that wasn’t the movement, if that makes sense. So the investigation was to do with whether it was possible to reach with my fingers, my physical body, the edge of the shadow and consequently there was a movement emerging from that. This sense of movement that emerges as a consequence of another investigation is something that I am interested in – it is almost like the movement needs mediating in some kind of way through another, through the prism of another investigation. I was thinking about this in relation to lens-based practice and the frame. Again, not again … that sense of dropping down – the movement investigation was micro. Maybe I was feeling doubtful or lacking confidence that the micro-movement was sufficient – if felt … ah, yes, there was something about non-expressivity. I did not want to do something that felt expressive. So, at the beginning there was a double difficulty – a difficulty to find the place to start and also a difficulty coming from the recognition or feeling the habits to be in the neighbourhood implies. You were doubting if you would or should begin in the neighbourhood but nevertheless you choose to begin in the park. And at the beginning you were facing another difficulty coming from the recognition of so many possibilities, facing this situation you came to wonder where the impulse to move comes from. And this is something that appears again in your experience. In the first realization it was the movement, the impulse to move doesn’t come from moving itself. And then you came to think about micro-movements as the source of movement, or as the origin of movement. In doing so, you came to see, or to be aware and to focus your attention on the floating images or things or phenomena on the surface of your eye. And you began to look at them, which led you back to this idea of micro-movements, the micro-movements of your head following these figures, these things on the surface of your eye. And then, the realization of the tendency to reflect on the practice arises. With this the realization that your training is based on light and on attention to the light. So I looked up neighbourhood – neighborly conduct, mutualfriendliness. It comes from neighbor and hood and its modern sense of community of people who live close together is recorded by the 1920s, and then I looked up light. Brightness, radiant energy, that which makes things visible. Light. Daylight. Spiritual illumination from the Proto-Germanic leukhtam. Source also from old saxon, from the root leuk- "light, brightness. I also looked up surface from the French – surface, an outermost boundary, outside part. Sur – above. Face – see face – I have not looked up that. Patterned on Latin superficies "surface, upper side, top". Then I also looked up shadow - sceadwe, sceaduwe "the effect of interception of sunlight, dark image cast by someone or something when interposed between an object and a source of light," oblique cases ("to the," "from the," "of the," "in the"). So neighbourhood, light, surface, shadow I was looking at. So we move again, rest. So Speaker becomes the Etymologist. Etymologist becomes the Listener. Listener becomes the Mirror. Mirror becomes the Speaker. So, this time my way of getting, influenced by some, so thinking about some of my practices I decided to vary it a little bit in getting into the Nahbereich and I decided to use the walk to the place I would, I thought to begin, in a walking meditation mode, so focusing on the connection between my steps and my breath. And doing that, so when I do that I always bring the eyes down, andthen I realize I was actually already constituting the Nahbereich. Although I didn’t intend to, I just intend to, also to enter in an aesthetic mode of acting, and when I realize that I continue with the plan. My plan was to reduce the rhythm, so I begin with four steps in and four steps out, which is quite fast for my experience of walking meditation … and my idea was to reduce this progressively and I did, also in terms of adopting this way of walking which might seem more estranged in a way in a place that is more far away from my apartment. And this is what I did. And I knew in advance which direction I was going to go, and it is a place where there is a change of neighbourhood and this also implies a change of urban texture. So I arrived at this place but I was already in my Nahbereich almost from the very beginning, and the most important thing was, the most important condition for that was to lower the eyes, the focus of my eyes. And, when I properly began, though I began before I intended to begin, I noticed something that I notice all the time, that is the Nahbereich tends to be stationary. There is a, for me in my experience, it is a not a contradiction, but it is a contradictory vector between establishing the Nahbereich, or constituting or co-constituting the Nahbereich, and moving. And in doing so, and in thinking that, I identify another bereich, another sphere, it is not another one, but I call it a middle one, a middle range. And I experience that, that this existence of the middle range or field, actually I realize this while I was writing, the existence of this middle range-field is not a problem for the Nahbereich. So it does not contribute to eliminate it, but rather helps the existence of, supports the existence of the Nahbereich by creating a kind of buffer, within which this Nahbereich can extend itself, or not extend, so the Nahbereich remains Nahbereich but can have a space of relaxation in another space and this allows the pressure that might arise out of these two vectors of being in the close field and being invite to having to move. So then I accepted this pulsation,this pulse of close and midrange, and this was positive for me inhabiting this, this Nahbereich. This time I went, I was going to say I allow myself, to be more tactile, to touch more the things, the matters, that belong, that appear in my Nahbereich. This was interesting for my promising action, so not to … to decentre from the visual and to allow tactile actions to be performed. And what happens from the very beginning is this enormous appearance of richness, so each centimeter, each site actually is full of interest, of attractors, of agencies. Reset. Mirror.  You started by two operations – one was the intention of reaching to a specific place that you had gone before and another used your own practice, a walking meditation practice to reach that specific place. You said afterwards that you wanted to, you made this decision because you wanted to reach a different neighbourhood, at least a different threshold between one and the other, a change, where the urban texture changes, and doing that by using your own meditation practice which combines steps and in and out breaths in a very specific structure. And, and it includes lowering your visual field to the ground, to lower the focus of the eyes to the ground. And, you did this to enter an aesthetic modefor entering the practice. And you realised that through entering your own practice you were already entering the proximity area, the proximity practice, but you only realized that while doing it.You played with the rhythm, so even there is something about the intention and the non-intention. So we had an intention to go somewhere to do the practice and you didn’t intend to start with the practice right away; but the practice started right away. Another intention was to structure the rhythm and play with coupling of breath and steps that brings you into a different kind of rhythms, no speeds. So, vary, variation – to transform, to change, to go astray. Change. Alter. Transform. Make different, bent or crooked. Constitute – to enter into the formation as a necessary part. From com- with and constituere "to cause to stand, set up”.Strange – unknown, not belonging, estranged, separate – from without, outside of. Lower – to descend, to sink or come to descend.  Stationary – having no apparent motion. Connected to station – station, the place which one normally occupies. Site or location. From the root sta, meaning to stand, to make or to be firm. Support – tolerate, bear, endure, sustain. To bring up or bring forward. From sub – up from under; and portare to carry or pass over. So, to bring up from under and to carry over. Buffer – absorbs a blow, deadens the concussion between a moving body and that against which it strikes. Prevent impact, neutralizes the shock of impact from opposing forces. Tactile – perceptible to touch, from the root tag – to touch or to handle. Vary. Constitute. (E)strange. Lower. Stationary. Support. Buffer. Tactile.

So trying to focus on the qualities or attributes of aesthetic thinking, of the relation of the practice to thinking … one of the things I was noticing was that that was, I noticed, I noticed that the condition of the Nahbereich. I had not seen this connection before but it feels like this is a condition of a certain kind of thinking. So,there was something to do with the qualities, in the practice that I was doing, but which I think is connected to aesthetic thinking, which is a relationship between being sufficiently connected to a certain degree of sensori-motor awareness but at the same time, and at the same time not distracted by the wider environment. So there was this dual relationship between activating a certain level of sensitivity or sensibility, and at the same time knocking back the wider sense of awareness.  So there was a kind of yes/no quality in the practice which was on the one hand, like I say, it was enabling, it was bringing into relation a certain quality of highly present, highly sensory engagement but at the same time keeping it contained within a certain sphere of experience in a way. So what I was doing is a walking and writing practice – and actually I realize, I had not realized before that these are the conditions of it. And, I think that there was also something to do with the capacity to be moving the body, or this movement betweenmovement and stillness seemed to be quite critical in a way. So the movement was also a way of holding attention, and then there are moments when a kind of linguistic thinking was beginning to happen. But it was held in a particular relation to the movement, and in a sense, it was coming from the conditions of that moving sensori-motor action. So what I was differentiating, what I was able to differentiate, was this is different to going on walk with a thought in mind and thinking about something whilst walking. So that kind of turning over a set of thinkings. So it was the opposite, it was beginning without the intention of thinking about something, and really beginning from the basis of establishing this condition of highly present but not distracted. So actually I was counting steps actually – not the breath and step correlation but counting steps. And every time I could feel that I was drifting off, there was something about coming back to this space of sensori-motor focus, but within the Nahbereich actually, within that specific containment. It was almost like being held within a certain fluid atmosphere - it was highly in the environment but also somehow slightly protected from it in a way or, no not protected … in it, but allowing the distraction part of the environment to be sort of held back. So there was something about this outside of the everydayness – and actually even something about being deeply being in the environment, in the situation but also being outside of it somehow. Really a contradictory sense of feeling deeply feeling connected to the environment, and here again, this relationship to the ground was really important, but somehow, the deeper the sensori-motor connection or the deeper the focus of the action got, the more it felt somehow connected to the environment but also outside of the environment. So there is this liminal sense, almost an out of timeness in a way. Yes, this out of timeness. Maybe going back to the sense of the balance – this just rightness of being sufficiently supported by the action … ah yes, this is right, there is something about the indirectness of the thinking, the thinking was not the focus.The walking was the focus that enabled the thinking to arise or emerge out of it. I could tell the difference because there was times in the action where I was thinking about something and it went off. And the quality of thinking that was coming from the action never went off. It stayed held within and there was something to do with trying to, not trying to push it further than it needed togo in a way. So staying only with the thought that arose specific to that moment and not pursuing it somehow – letting it come onto the page because I was making written notes, but then not going ah, yeah yeah yeah and wanting to develop it further. Letting it be. And then I would go back to the walking and then something else might arise. So I was also trying, not trying … it struck me that there was a difference between reflection on or reflection about and thinking-with. I think that this is also true of yesterday, when I thought I was reflecting on I don’t think I was, I think I was thinking with the action. I think that there is something about trying to differentiate those two modes which feels very critical in a way. Really the thinking coming out by, and conditioned by, and as a consequence of the action. And then there was something to with the way that the walking provided a quality of stability – so on the one hand it unhinged me from certain kinds of habits but on the other hand it provided a quality of stability. For I can get quite excited if I am thinking and it can go a bit giddy sometimes – like when I am going off it can go a little giddy, even a little ecstatic, where it can get a bit too much. So coming back to the walking grounded, and then this giddiness also goes away from being in the body and being connected to a sensori-motor experience. So this coming back, this coming back, enabled it to be sustained in some kind of way. And then towards the end I was going off, and I was thinking about this word ‘support’ which came up in yesterday’s etymological exploration. Something like – sub – up from under, and then carried over. Up from under and carried over. There is something of a quality of support in the action that enabled a sense of thinking, so this sense of it bubbling up from nowhere in a way. I think that the whole talk was structured by a duality from the very beginning and I think that this duality was expressed in different ways. At the beginning it was expressed as a duality between an intense connection, between sensori-motor awareness and high level of sensitivity with the environment and on the other hand avoiding the wider sphere of this environment. And then afterwards, this is expressed as a way of saying not being distracted by everything that is happening, but rather being contained or even protected from distractions. So, and afterwards this duality is also expressed, which for me is the same duality that appears expressed or formulated in different ways – this duality between on the one hand, between being deeply in the situation or connected to the environment and on the other hand and at the same time outside of the environment. There was also the expression of this everyday experience, no not everyday experience, a deep connection with it and a disconnection with it. Next point was also the idea of the indirectness of this kind of thinking. So it is a thinking, which is actually a consequence of other actions, in this case, walking, or a combination between walking and writing. And it is not a thinking that is pushed or pursued or developed. So it is not … it is a thinking that is to do with allowing the thinking to be thought, or the process of thinking to arise spontaneously out of something else, even out of nowhere, or out of this deep connection with the body, with the environment; in the connection between the body and the environment. And another expression, another duality, which is not the expression of the same duality,is the duality of reflecting on or about and thinking with. Understanding that,aesthetic thinking might have to do with the reflection with or the thinking with and not the thinking or reflection on or about. This kind of thinking has a continuity, which is sustained, so sustained by this highly sensitive sensori-motor self or sensori-motor body and environment. So I looked up thinking and I found several aspects of thinking or different ways of thinking – I found overthink, reasoning, cognitive, forethought. Overthink, also exhaust oneself with too much thinking. The reasoning – exercise of the act of reason, act or process of thinking logically. Also an instance of this reason. Cognitive – having the power of thinking or meditating. Thoughtful – given to contemplation. Forethought – a thinking before hand, the act of planning. Verbal noun – of fore think, of thinking before and to premeditate, consider, see forth. For and think. Then I looked up ground – an Old English grund "bottom; foundation; surface of the earth,"also "abyss, Hell," and "bottom of the sea". A "deep place". Swedish grund, there are all different kinds of grund."Ground, soil, bottom;"a shallow place. grund "field, plain," grunnr "bottom". And then I also looked up focus - "point of convergence," from Latin focus "hearth, fireplace" (also, figuratively, "home, family"),which is of unknown origin. Used in post-classical times for "fire" itself; taken by Kepler (1604) in a mathematical sense for "point of convergence," perhaps on analogy of the burning point of a lens (the purely optical sense of the word may have existed before Kepler, but it is not recorded). Introduced into English 1650s by Hobbes. Sense transfer to "center of activity or energy" is first recorded 1796. Activate – I looked up activate. "make active, intensify; see action meaning put into action. Originally in chemistry. Related - activated; activating. And then I looked up awareness –"state of being aware", from aware and ness. I looked up aware as an adjective – late Old English gewær "watchful, vigilant", from Proto-Germanic *ga-waraz (source also of Old Saxon giwar). For me, I was circling both around a word and not the definition of an action, because I realise again and again I, the word itself makes sense for me for the practice. But also I cannot define it in fact. So that was action that I was very busy with while being active with the action. And the word is diving. For me, it was very much, I mean, even to start the practice I realised that had to slip in a moment of tuning, of own tuning, to know what I would be doing. So this process of decision-making is a process that I need a physical, not an exercise, but I need some physical time in which I find the start for an exploration outside, for practising outside. In order to, and this start, to define it, is both through a word that comes from the scores, I call them operational scores that I have to facilitate the start, but still I never know which one is the one that I need now to start. The start of the start is the diving. So how is tuning going into diving at that moment, and the diving, there is this paradox of, of, of having this very clear word that came through practicing, that was found through practising, through communicating with the practice of others and that totally makes sense, physical and aesethetic sense for me. But still I have no idea how it actually works. So there is something I need to let work, and I have my tuning exercises to approach it, but maybe it is almost like a state, that is maybe a close definition to it. It is approaching, it has a feeling … that is why diving … for practising the city I need to reconfigure my ways of relating both to myself and to everything around. And likewise it is not a direct reconfiguration, it is not a reconfiguration that goes from A to B. It is somehow changing different screws … trying to turn them but also giving in to the turning of the screws. So, and this is a physical, sensori-motor process, but not only because language comes in that process continuously. I haven’t quite figured out how that actually works. But for example, the diving as a word is both a hook, like something I can come back to in order not to get lost, but simultaneously it is something that is totally open. But there is a moment where it happens, and this moment .. so I was also more busy with this process both because I haven’t really entered it for a long time, and also because we were so much talking about the conditions of aesthetic thinking to happen, through aesthetic research practices. How to enter, the question really how to enter. And of course,entering into what. So it is both conditioning one another and very much so with this mode of entering the city. So I somehow, a lot of things happen, but I somehow, finishing the sequence, I am jumping now through the whole trajectory, but finishing the sequence I start to, there are two things – I acknowledge by word and not only by doing, something of a deep pleasure and I think it has, it has a lot to do with this approach that could happen. The other thing is that maybe this entering, the diving in is something of an aesthetic mode of being with the city, but not giving into the city and this means also what I think, what I read, it is connected to the me as a socially constructed being, trying to read and to fit in another way. Thinking of my kids going to a German school trying to fit into a system that they don’t know – this is a different kind of fitting in. The fitting in through an aesthetic mode or actually the embedding of oneself, or letting oneself embed within the city is then a completely different verticality maybe and that goes back to the process of diving, and the process of diving actually even though it is something that I am trying to let happen, especially in the beginning in order to then start to go. Becausewhat it does is allow movement, many movements, but foremost movement, like a shifting, transforming, transforming on many levels, transforming of reading, maybe alsolet reading rest as an activity. It also produces a kind of – one part of being with the city in that mode, it is not trying to understanding anything- it is rather the opposite. It is more … I need to think this, this process of diving is not only timewise in a one hour practice, it is not only at the beginning of a practice, it happens again and again and again and it deepens. It helps to, it happens. It doesn’t help for anything specific. One could probably name this but again it then has the danger of going into a one-way logic – it is good for something. And I think that the fact of it being at work is the important point somehow – it allows for a recalibration of relations, of reading, of making sense, very much of making sense. That was another thing – I have now making the notation, it allows for, it allows in the best moments for something I am not sure if it is connected to aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices – there was a moment, it allows for. So what I understood, you started by circling around a word which was not a definition for you. And the circling around this maybe phenomenon that makes a big sense for your practice, for a practice, you were talking about it as an active, it is activation with the action. You were describing, describing around and then you named the word diving as the start of the practice and also you were talking about the diving as something happening again and again, it is not a constant phenomenon. It is more something that appears again. And you had to prepare or to let this diving appear, slip into your own tuning. So after our common tuning you had to slip into your own tuning as a reference or establishing for the diving to happen. SO for you it was a process of physical time which you found the start to act. And you were talking about your operational scores, so called operational scores. And questioning yourself about what do I need to dive into. How is the tuning going into diving as a question. And you have no answer for that yet, it is, it was more of an observation – the diving is happening after you took care of several things. Like for example, you were mentioning books and material that you want to approach. SO you are establishing that field of work as a state, maybe or as a field. And then you were trying to describe this phenomenon or maybe magical moment – when is the diving happening and there you were also using this picture of screws that you have to use, or tuning in very different kind of screws that you cannot name more specifically. You were talking about screws that are in relation to each other and it is definitely a physical sensory mode, and then there is this moment when it happens but still you question yourself how to enter. How to enter this especially through this thinking aesthetic thinking through artistic research practices. Then you were coming back again about, talking about the importance for you to finish the sequence, you were explaining it was a deep pleasure and this deep pleasure also allowed you to move on and maybe to let the diving happen as a result or in connection with this pleasure and forms of happiness or forms of openness. And you were also talking about the difference between what it means to embed into the city and for you it was more of a vertical picture or vertical movement, more manifested in relation this embedded, there is the diving that allows more movement. It is not about understanding what you experience it is more about moving into and letting evolve something and you were talking about there is always as if it is an alive ecology of itself that happens and you are witnessing that, you are witnessing the diving. Circle - to encompass or surround. Active - "given to worldly activity" as opposed to contemplative or monastic. From actus  "a doing", from the root *ag- "to drive, draw out or forth, move". Capable of acting. Opposed to inactive, opposed to passive or reflexive. Dive – to descend or plunge headfirst.From dufan "to dive, duck, sink". From dyfan "to dip, submerge". From early thirteenth century as "to make a plunge". Figurative sense of "plunge entirely into something that engrosses the attention" is from 1580s. In Middle English also transitive, "to submerge (something), make to sink down. Then dive leading to deep - having considerable extension downward. Old Church Slavonic duno "bottom, foundation.Old Irish domun "world," via sense development from "bottom" to "foundation" to "earth" to "world").Extensive in any direction analogous to downward. Low in pitch, intense. Let - to allow, to let go, slacken. From  the root *lē-

Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to let go, slacken." Embed – from em- "put in or into, bring to a certain state,". Bed – a resting place; from *bhedh- "to dig, pierce" and beda- "to pierce, prick,". Again, from ongean - toward; opposite, against. From the Old Norse gegn "straight, direct." So something about this prefix a- … against the straight and direct, once more. Enter  – to go into, to initiate. 

The sounds and the images were on the one hand two parallel, autonomous layers, even worlds. Although sometimes they seemed to touch each other, or to have some points of coincidence, although I knew that this was not constructed. This was a coincidence actually. And yet somehow they belong, they have something in common, they have a common, maybe common atmosphere or a common environment. They still are, they still have, although one of these acoustic layers seems to have disappeared, it resonates, it keeps on resonating, as if sounds would have, the spoken words have found a place in the drawing very much. And continue, more than resonating there, resonate from there. There is something abouta merging of felt or even physical rhythmical qualities that intrigue one another, I have the feeling. That goes both on a very, it is like Schinnung, I don’t know what the English word is for it, swinging, not really, so things start to swing with one another, begin to swing. But it is transforming all the time, there is something physical about it, that anticipates or sometimes even anticipated something that happened in the drawing on a complete … For me, I feel like moving actually. I am struck by the kind of interweaving of emergence between the different parts, I was just looking up this word, association. Because in a sense it feels like it is not that, so not association. A coming together, but not through association somehow. So association is this act of coming together for a common purpose, joining with, uniting with, companionship or ally. Organised body of persons with a common purpose, quality of or thing drawn to mind by something else. And, I get the sense that association would be more in this kind of, the association between the drawn and the spoken, between one component and another, and it felt much less easy to tell what was originating and what was responding. So this sense of the mutual that came up, this mutual emergence, each creating the conditions for the other. Somehow. And also between the voices. Yes, the consequential aspect of cause and effect, or the chronological aspect of cause and effect, felt complicated, more like a web of relations. I am wondering if association, if you take it apart, it is neither dissociation, or in my feeling, associate, like a-sociation, something that is being directly put and combined with one another. It is also not what appeared very often, that this something, it is like a something, a moment, it occupies a third space or defines even a third space or a different type of sociating of things, that are maybe together but not shared. As I look a little further it seems that there is this sense of to follow. I guess the sense of this mutuality complicates the idea of following, yes mutual. This is interesting – neither follower or leader, but a mutual arising of something. Reciprocity, this reciprocity of giving and receiving. This notion of the common is there, meaning the common, freely interchanged. It is a common which is not at the beginning there, a common which is happening, but only exists if it happens, when it happens. And it does not leave, or maybe yes it leaves traces, but it is not a stable thing as such, so it is an affect, it is something not intended, not constructed. Not even sustained, not sustainable. It is sustainable but it is not sustained. Or if the common or the mutual is not intended, I am wondering. Because I had the feeling like it is common but it is an unknown common. So it is not, it is like an alien, let’s say unknown, it felt like in many parts I can’t, I couldn’t name, or the common doesn’t feel associated as something together, it doesn’t feel like something known in the sense of common, common as something that I can recognize, that I can re-cognize. It is a different common that kind of emerges. This sense of intending, the dual sense of having directed one’s attention to ... so intend, to direct one’s attention, literally to stretch out towards, also has the sense of having a plan in mind or having a purpose. So this interesting double possibility of not intending might mean to not have a plan or purpose in mind, but it could also mean to not direct one’s attention, or to direct one’s attention elsewhere. To turn one’s attention away from.Or even not moving towards something. It is a kind of moving displacement shifts with a purpose or a goal or at least a horizon, so at least in this sense the commonalities we sensed were not intended. Here in intend, the sense of turning one’s attention as in to strain in the quest for something, a quality of zealousness or zeal. So to not intend, might mean to not strain. So here to strain is to bind or tie, to fasten, draw tight, congeal or freeze or become stiff. Again there is this quality of tightening or of making taut … exertion, yes, to over exert. So without over-exertion. Or to unfasten, to untie, to unbind. To not intend, to unbind, untie, unfasten. To un-congeal, to unfreeze, to loosen, relax. Or collapse. This coming into form of a very particular configuration and something in the situation shifting which suddenly changes the register of what is being seen or being experienced.The removal of something, or the shifting of something that suddenly brings the background into the fore. Or the periphery somehow into a more focused attention. Or the constitution of time relating to something that already happened and something that is not here yet. I think here also this sense of holding back, holding back, in order to let something emerge, holding back something. Or withdrawal, holding back, withdrawal. Inhibition even, in order to let something else exert itself or emerge or bloom. Constitution as physical health, strength and vigour of the body and of the mind as temperament and character. So maybe … the dynamics of how things are constituted. I find it interesting that there is a direct history in the word that has to do with the physicality in both temperament as well as the strength and physicality of the body. That very strongly has to do with how things become constituted and later becomes a mode of organization for example, the state. This sense of the paper, the movement of something, attending to the movement of something else, somehow enabling the movement of the thinking and the speaking and then in the stillness a shift in tone, maybe a sense of searching more actively for something to grasp on to. And the movement in the frame allows or even lubricating a more fluid sense of connections between words and now in the stillness almost a sense of grasping for something, like no longer being carried by it, this sense of being carried by something a little, or supported by something, like a kind of thinking that is supported by something or carried by something or taken along in a way, no. What supports or carries the thinking-doing? Or carried out, maybe it is to be carried out of oneself, myself, this engagement with the movement carries me out of myself somehow. Yes, I am not so much following, not so much following something, as being carried by it. Or taken with it. Carried or taken or moved by a momentum that I am not fully in control of somehow. Like a breeze. There is a breeze in there. Floated almost.Or sliding, this reference to sliding earlier. This movement from walking into sliding, or skating, or gliding. There is a movement into continuity in some ways I guess. Or it is a movement that is, you have to give over to the ice. You have to give over more of the agency to ice in order to skate or to glide. Yes. What happens then if the eyes are not, can’t, I mean, if the eyes, if you, what is the sliding without the eyes? I think that there is some, or there is different types of engagement of the eyes, and how the eyes work, in relation to the common or the mutual or how that co-constitutes the common and mutual, that acts. On the one hand, there is something with the eyes which is very separating. I feel it works on the basis of this separation between something being seen and where the seeing happens. On the other hand, sometimes there is a transmission beyond that but while the eyes are still important, so not seeing, would make it maybe impossible, there is something a movement quality of the … this term to glide, glide away or vanish, to slip. Involving notions of smoothness, shining and joyfulness. From the root, ghel, meaning to call. To call or to shine. The joy, this sense of delight, and pleasure, this gliding with some degree of pleasure. Or to entice or lure.

3.

It is getting stuck somewhere in my body. I need the translation time. But it is like the stone, one focused condensed image, physical image that I had, so somehow it is going, the attempt to form words, since I know that this is coming, this is part of what we do, this was already engrained in the exercise, so then I can hold onto it. Like a mental note that I did during the exercise, when I understood that this is a moment that I can grasp. As there are all these nameless situations or moments that are not graspable yet and that need a different navigation in order to be communicated. It was really a physical sensation turning into an image - engrained in my skin. So they start to grow into the tree, or the tree incorporates the thing. I accepted it as being part of my structure. 

But maybe there is another way to refer to language, or to mobilize language in this situation? What is that? Something different than brings it into language, brings something into language – it is probably the experience. And this is different than to put into words, it is something different to forming words, I think it is something different than grasping or naming. There are alternatives to that - what is an aesthetic use of language? What if when we move to the medium of language, what if we begin to act within the medium of language, continuing doing the same? The question of touching, of the with. Bring it forth through or better with language. To bring it forth, continue to bring it to life, to continue experiencing, with language. Not forcing language to be a grasping tool. But a touching tool. 

We have embodied this rigidity, of abandoning the playfulness in order to reduce our movements and to talk and to write and to read. Begin to write - produce articulated signs, touching the stone. To keep the fundamental continuity of the mode of doing, and not to go into another, a rigidity, another functionality, another operability, because we enter, because we enter the medium of language. Language unfolding from that experience, in the same key or texture as that experience. This language-with, thinking-with, unfolding.

Shaped by the feeling of the stone. It felt a cognitive operation but not a linguistic operation. This experience was reverberating with some of the non-linguistic dimensions of cognition. There were two things in my encounter with the stone, one was, or might be, a kind of linguistic manifestation that comes from that first, that follows the impulse of the material encounter with the stone into language, rather than it being about grasping it, but the other, was more like that there were very particular insights that seemed to arise around, in a way, different species of cognition, that really came to the fore, through the encounter with the stone. Am I really thinking with the stone, or am I thinking about the stone? What it means to think with the stone.

I would like to make a distinction between aesthetic acting or aesthetic cognition and acting in a certain medium. So aesthetic acting or aesthetic thinking for me is defined by a way of acting, by a disposition, and this can be realized in whatever medium. The medium of course, changes the way we act. This aboutness - this is very easy to be realized in language. Whereas this withness mode might be easier in the medium of a touching body. This withness mode is also possible with language; with a certain mobilization of this medium, language. Poetry is a rather withness mode. Becoming in touch, or being in contact with, and I don’t think that this can be named as about. What if I let words arise out of the experience? 

This moment of finding - what can it tell me? As if being present right now here with you, interacting with the thoughts. What is this mouth and this tongue forming? The stone is so concrete, so materialized and so dense. What does it mean to feel the sound of thought while I talk and my breath? I want to play with that … thinking of, thinking, forming, breathing, embodying, the relation, my relation, touch, tongue, and then there is this. Stone. This mute quality of presence, a material physical presence. How does it shape my presence? It is somehow an engrained process. What did the stone make me be? 

Not now and not before, I was never looking at an object. Because you can listen to someone who is silent - to bring that attitude of listening to the stone as well. Listening to the muteness - and it was not silent.   

Spaciousness. The territory of the paper - the continuity of space or where is the space actually happening. Using this, the range of the sight already, to include or integrate the other what is there, but focusing, having the focus like a torchlight on one, but at the same time realising that there is the other, and this is coming together. How big it can expand? The space is there, and it is expanding. Space and spaciousness. Again wondering how this spaciousness comes, this feeling of spaciousness comes through relating to a perception of how things are together.

Things and how they are together, or how I perceive them as together, or not. So thinking about the process of them being made. But here there was something very much to do with letting go of a sense of the history of their production to really focus on an encounter with what is perceptually there. 

This kind of lively lightness, a quality of lightness. Again the flight of thought, a sense of when you notice it going into thought, does it really have to go into thought. Why can I not just stay with it? I am practicing one mode of engagement over another mode of engagement. Recognising what that habit does in terms of being open to the range of possibilities that experience brings. I am making a decision, I am making a decision to keep exiting one mode of encounter through preference of another mode of encounter.

So, there were two lines and there were two framed lines – these are two different things. How do you modify the frame implicitly? This correspondence between language and the eye.

Let words appear, without the intention of grasping something but rather creating, or reinforcing, or realizing an object of perception in language. Words, organized signs, organised graphic signs, sounds or images can be produced or emerge. They can be the result of self-centred, target-oriented, will-based actions or/and can be the result of a distributed field of agencies. There is a variety of modes of interaction in the media of language, if we think that.

How are my senses mobilized in order to constitute this sphere - this sphere is constituted through a certain mobilization of my senses. So they must find a kind of a systemative attuning with one another. So how do I mobilise my visual sense, my tactile sense, and how do I do this in moving. What I liked was immediate sphere. In terms of I can reach it, whatever it is, in this sphere, immediately, in terms of without taking, without needing to, to, to, make a connection in between. So it is like if I see something I have to go there, so there is something in between my intention and me achieving this goal. There is this threshold of rubbing up against habits of being in the world. My attentional threshold was at the limit the body but within the body, and not … it was self-contained.

An impulse to move. The smell suddenly activated a really different kind of stillness, a much less self-conscious stillness. My area of interest was much more close to my body but what was interesting was it was not introspective. So it stayed local to the body, very proximate to the body, but there was no tendency – which I can certainly have – to introspect. It stayed near, but not going into. Also sensing the movement already happening and by doing these really tiny shifts there were unfolding so many options so it was almost overwhelming to have all these options of coming into. I could realize that the sounding of my breath would extend the proximate sphere or the moment, it kind of related to another dimension.

The sound can be present but not in a reaching way. Something about the felt sensation of sound within the proximate sphere might still include sounds originating elsewhere but there is the registering of them, like the reverberation of them within the proximate sphere. The skin experience of the body felt important, or dominant, it did not feel important, it felt dominant. What I was curious about was whether the sense of the proximate sphere has to be activated in my own experience much more as a zone with spatial thickness to include more of the interior experiences of the body but might almost fluctuate beyond the limit of the body’s proximate sphere. 

What is the vibrating body, and where is the sound? This question seems to me absolutely relevant for the constitution of this sphere. Because this apparently clear distinction between senses of proximity or of distance is not so clear. The question would be what is the sound and what is the image? This transition between inner and outer because it is not about being internal closed-up but it is something that is starting to relate, or letting the relation happening, or letting the connection happening. 

What is this becoming aware of, coming connecting with, getting in touch with? What is this moment of happening where … where do I shift then, and where is the shift happening? 

This is a practice of localizing proximity or delineating proximity, constituting proximity. The constitution of this proximate sphere is a condition. It was something to do with the representational idea of the sphere somehow creating a sense of containment or withdrawal from the environment. That edge was rendered more porous, or where the representation collapsed. The scent of the blossom. This was within my proximate sphere but not what I might call ‘me’. A few moments in that experience where the edge was much more soft.

I think that acting aesthetically, the “I” becomes a medium. This ‘I’ is not an egocentric ‘I’ – it opens up, it becomes for me a medium to define this sphere, and for me, what is relevant in the act of perceiving, what is in my experience, is this sphere which needs me as a point in the world to be defined but this ‘me as a point in the world’ is not the focus of my attention but this sphere needs operatively this point in the world to exist. But it is not egocentric. I wasn’t appearing. In aesthetic experience there is a kind of this paradox, which is not, but it seems to be a paradox, that there is a hyper-activation of subjectivity, but subjectivity as egocentric experience disappears. Aesthetic action implies a non-egocentric use or mobilization of subjectivity. It is through me, but I do not appear.

A kind of momentum between a grounding experience, a settling experience, and then some of the practices had an agitating feeling in a sense, stirring in a sense really, even a bit excitable. Then coming back to a stiller sense. An excitement that happens on a very subtle, but very present in a way. Actualizing. The excitement starts to happen when there are possibilities that are actualized. Then different processes start.

It is really something that grounds in the same way. This relation between the moment to receive something and what is it, and the moment where I actively move into.,

I realize that there are different levels of thoughts that connect in a specific form or that show up in a specific form with different qualities, with a different pace. What do I allow to be? What do I allow to happen? Seeing this interweaving. What does it mean to hold back?

I need time to digest until it is transformed or integrated, the integration of information. There is somehow a fluidity in a textural space, a textorium really.

The softness of the ground - this unevenness, this aliveness of the floor. I was not taking a straight path. Between the relation between standing and moving the ground, and crouching and touching the floor with my hands. Sitting, even lying. There was somehow a range of physical movements that became more possible, that become very fluid, the line between these different modes was subtle. There is a coming alive in the moment that creates conditions for thinking somehow. Releasing and at the same time arising - a release into and something that is uprising.

Different kinds of physical processes, a different kind of thoughtful thinking action process starts and it couples back. That moment I let go, I continue with some movement and all of a sudden the immediateness of the sphere and some sensuous qualities that I dismissed when I was thinking about this specific question came back.

The sense of score as a set of rules. What comes in there is the question of at what level of the game does the score play? These conditions your habits and then you have to be able to inhabit the field of potentiality that the rules enable. Is it that it precedes action, or it is evolving through action, or even that it retrospectively gives a sense of structure to what has been? It is actually something that supports my being with the place. I can almost slip in between, I can allow myself to be there and explore further steps from there. 

Gentleness - something happened on the physical level of gentleness. It produced or constituted a gentleness of being there and also physically of joints, articulating themselves differently. It is also a feeling of moving into things. It is a different kind of choosing.

There is something of us being upright, topologically, we have our hands free - we can look into far away. So there was this process of acceptance in your realization of the Nahbereich. From there you could expand your attention into further or wider zones.

The gentleness, the gentleness allowed you to be, or allowed the constitution of the gentleness, the constitution of gentleness allowed the being there, or the articulation of, in different directions that could continue after, through the gentleness. There was this feeling of moving into things one after another. A different kind of choosing, continuously moving. Accepting what is there to move on. The disappearance of one thing - exploring: ex – out; and plorare, to weep, to cry. Gentleness. Which comes from gentilis – from the same family or clan; and from gene to give birth. So, yes. So to explore with gentleness could be an interesting combination. To crying.

I noticed moments of disorientation. I appreciate these inbetween zones of being orientated and being disorientated, there are movements happening, a kind of stretching out. Also in terms of what makes me move. It stimulates my curiosity. Maybe there is also a connection in feeling comfortable. There is something that reaches out. Either they are more reaching out areas, and others are more perceiving and, perceiving, the letting in or welcoming. 

The preconditions for exploring was establishing a sense of comfort. What seemed to emerge was this interplay between a sense of orientation and a sense of disorientation. And it seemed that it was in the movement between orientation and disorientation, that the movement of curiosity began to arise in a way. At times reaching further, at times feeling more proximate. There were parts of the body that felt as if they had more of a quality of reaching out towards a sense of external world if you like, and others which were more in the key of perceiving or letting in experience. Here not so much to do with the interplay of orientation and disorientation but between the influence or pull of the environment and internal needs. And the dynamic or the navigation or the negotiation that was happening between these forces. The word – com obviously comes from with, so it is Latin; and fortis coming from strong. 

An overwhelm of different calls or possibilities. The impulse to move, the impulse of curiosity does not necessarily come from the matter of the body somehow. The impulse to move does not really come from movement. Certain kinds of micro-movements or other kinds of movements facilitated my movements. This kind of shimmering on my retina. I noticed those floating shapes that you get on the surface of the eye – and I became interested in this as the proximate sphere, or as the edge of the body in a way. Using the impulse of the movement of these floating phenomenon on my eye to take me in certain directions. So starting with this very micro-movement as something moved to follow that. These things on the surface of my eye were calling me to move. And I think I was also moving in and out of the direct experience. Reflecting on the experience rather than being in the experience. 

The call of, drawing me. As I move closer it kept moving away and as I was trying to reach towards it, it moves away. Something to do with trying to touch the limit of the shadow, this was also producing movement. There is a movement that was emerging out of necessity through an investigation that wasn’t the movement. This sense of movement that emerges as a consequence of another investigation. The movement needs mediating in some kind of way through another. I was thinking about this in relation to lens-based practice and the frame. The micro-movements of your head following these figures. The realization of the tendency to reflect on the practice arises. On light and on attention to the light. Bring the eyes down. Then I realize I was actually already constituting the Nahbereich. And I knew in advance.

Space of relaxation in another space - this pulse of close and midrange. I allow myself, to be more tactile, to touch more the things, the matters, that belong, that appear. A different threshold. To lower the focus of the eyes to the ground.

You played with the rhythm, so even there is something about the intention and the non-intention. So, vary, variation – to transform, to change, to go astray. Change. Alter. Transform. Make different, bent or crooked. Constitute – to enter into the formation as a necessary part. From com- with and constituere "to cause to stand, set up”. Strange – unknown, not belonging, estranged, separate – from without, outside of. So, to bring up from under and to carry over. 

This is a condition of a certain kind of thinking. There was something to do with the qualities connected to aesthetic thinking, which is a relationship between being sufficiently connected to a certain degree of sensori-motor awareness but at the same time, and at the same time not distracted by the wider environment.This dual relationship between activating a certain level of sensitivity or sensibility, and at the same time knocking back the wider sense of awareness. A kind of yes/no quality in the practice. Highly present, highly sensory engagement but at the same time keeping it contained within a certain sphere of experience in a way. Something to do with the capacity to be moving the body, or this movement between movement and stillness.

There are moments when a kind of linguistic thinking was beginning to happen. Beginning from the basis of establishing this condition of highly present but not distracted. Something about coming back to this space of sensori-motor focus, but within the Nahbereich actually, within that specific containment. It was almost like being held within a certain fluid atmosphere - allowing the distraction part of the environment to be sort of held back. Really a contradictory sense of feeling deeply feeling connected to the environment.

There is this liminal sense, almost an out of timeness in a way. This just rightness of being sufficiently supported by the action. There is something about the indirectness of the thinking. The walking was the focus that enabled the thinking to arise or emerge out of it. And the quality of thinking that was coming from the action never went off. Staying only with the thought that arose specific to that moment and not pursuing it somehow – letting it come. Letting it be. And then I would go back to the walking and then something else might arise. The thinking coming out by, and conditioned by, and as a consequence of the action. The way that the walking provided a quality of stability - being connected to a sensori-motor experience.

Up from under and carried over. There is something of a quality of support in the action that enabled a sense of thinking. A duality between an intense connection, between sensori-motor awareness and high level of sensitivity with the environment and on the other hand avoiding the wider sphere of this environment. This is expressed as a way of saying not being distracted by everything that is happening, but rather being contained or even protected from distractions.

The indirectness of this kind of thinking. A thinking that is to do with allowing the thinking to be thought, or the process of thinking to arise spontaneously out of something else, even out of nowhere. The duality of reflecting on or about and thinking with. Aesthetic thinking might have to do with the reflection with or the thinking with and not the thinking or reflection on or about. This kind of thinking has a continuity, which is sustained, so sustained by this highly sensitive sensori-motor self or sensori-motor body and environment.

Ground – from the Old English grund "bottom; foundation; surface of the earth." Focus - "point of convergence"; focus "hearth, fireplace" (also, figuratively, "home, family").

And the word is diving.  I need some physical time in which I find the start for an exploration. The start of the start is the diving. There is this paradox of, of, of having this very clear word that came through practising, that was found through practising. Language comes. I can come back to in order not to get lost. How to enter, the question really how to enter? Entering into what? Conditioning one another. What it does is allow movement, many movements, but foremost movement, like a shifting, transforming, transforming on many levels. Let reading rest as an activity.

It happens again and again and again and it deepens. It helps to, it happens. And the circling around. And you had to prepare or to let this diving appear, slip into your own tuning. And then there is this moment when it happens but still you question yourself how to enter. it was a deep pleasure and this deep pleasure also allowed you to move on and maybe to let the diving happen as a result or in connection with this pleasure and forms of happiness or forms of openness. 

Active - from actus  "a doing", from the root *ag- "to drive, draw out or forth, move". Dive – to descend or plunge headfirst. Sometimes they seemed to touch each other, or to have some points of coincidence. This was a coincidence actually. And continue, more than resonating there, resonate from there. A merging of felt or even physical rhythmical qualities that intrigue one another - so things start to swing with one another, begin to swing. 

I am struck by the kind of interweaving of emergence between the different parts - a coming together, but not through association. This mutual emergence, each creating the conditions for the other. The chronological aspect of cause and effect, felt complicated, more like a web of relations. It occupies a third space or defines even a third space or a different type of sociating of things, that are maybe together but not shared. The sense of this mutuality complicates the idea of following, yes, mutual.

Reciprocity, this reciprocity of giving and receiving. This notion of the common is there, meaning the common, freely interchanged. It is a common which is not at the beginning there, a common which is happening, but only exists if it happens, when it happens. It is not a stable thing as such, so it is an affect, it is something not intended, not constructed. I had the feeling like it is common but it is an unknown common. Unknown. This sense of intending, the dual sense of having directed one’s attention to ... so intend, to direct one’s attention, literally to stretch out towards. Or, even not moving towards something. It is a kind of moving displacement shifts with a purpose or a goal or at least a horizon, so at least in this sense the commonalities we sensed were not intended. 

Again there is this quality of tightening or of making taut … exertion, yes, to over exert. To not intend, to unbind, untie, unfasten. To un-congeal, to unfreeze, to loosen, relax. Or collapse. The removal of something, or the shifting of something that suddenly brings the background into the fore. Or the periphery somehow into a more focused attention. I think here also this sense of holding back, holding back, in order to let something emerge, holding back something. Or withdrawal, holding back, withdrawal.

The movement of something, attending to the movement of something else, somehow enabling the movement of the thinking and the speaking and then in the stillness a shift in tone. And the movement in the frame allows or even lubricating a more fluid sense of connections between words and now in the stillness almost a sense of grasping for something, like no longer being carried by it, this sense of being carried by something a little, or supported by something, like a kind of thinking that is supported by something or carried by something or taken along in a way, no. What supports or carries the thinking-doing? 

Carried or taken or moved by a momentum that I am not fully in control of somehow. Like a breeze. There is a breeze in there. Floated. Sliding. Walking into sliding, or skating, or gliding. There is a movement into continuity. there is different types of engagement of the eyes, and how the eyes work, in relation to the common or the mutual or how that co-constitutes the common and mutual, that acts. 

LEFT TO RIGHT:

(1) 26.03.2021. Text generated through the Practice of Reading (Distillation) using Conversation-as-Material transcripts as source text.

(2) 18.05.2021: Text generated through moving between the Practice of Reading (Noticing Attraction) and Practice of Reading (Distillation) (using Conversation-as-Material Distillation as source material) parallel to the Practice of Explorative Drawing and of Material Encounter.

(3) 20.05.2021: Text generated through moving between the Practice of Reading (Noticing Attraction) and the Practice of Distillation using Conversation-as-Material transcript as source material parallel to the Practice of Explorative Drawing and of Material Encounter.

(4) 16.06.2021: Text generated through a sequence of Ecologies in Action: 1, 3, 5, 7. Practice of Reading (Noticing Attraction) using Conversation-as-Material [Distillation] in parallel to Practices of Drawing and of Material Encounter; 

2, 4, 6. Practice of Reading (Distillation) using Conversation-as-Material [Distillation] in parallel to Practices of Drawing and of Material Encounter.

8. Practice of Live Transcription (of Conversation-as-Material) in parallel to Practices of Close Video Observation; Proximity Sphere (variation with camera),Drawing and Material Encounter.

(5) 18.06.2021: Text generated through a sequence of Ecologies in Action: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 Practice of Reading (Noticing Attraction) using Conversation-as-Material [Distillation Part 1] in parallel to Practices of Drawing and of Material Encounter; 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 Practice of Reading (Conversation Distillation Part 1) using Conversation-as-Material [Distillation Part 1] in parallel to Practices of Drawing and of Material Encounter; 15. Practice of Live Transcription (of Conversation-as-Material) in parallel to Practices of Close Video Observation; Proximity Sphere (variation with camera), Drawing and Material Encounter.

Distillations generated through different reading practices of the transcript material (including Reading: Noticing Attraction)

1.

The way I entered this practice - resonates. How are my senses mobilized? The sphere is constituted by a certain mobilization of my senses. The constitution of this sphere, this is what resonates. How are my senses mobilized in order to constitute this sphere? What is the balance of the senses – the visual, the tactile, the olfactory, the tactile? It depends on the inclination of my head. I notate it as, I notice it as, I notate it as - I notice it as the constitution of this sphere. Sounding. Sounding. The sounding of my breath would extend the allowance of something. What I call the constitution of the - what I liked was – immediate sphere. Immediately - in terms of without taking, without needing to make a connection in between. This threshold of rubbing up against habits of being in the world - it is the confrontation with the shock of that, the confrontation of the shock of certain habits. Thinking how is this mode different? A sense of where I am going. I am able to touch, to touch making a small movement, a kind of systematic attunement. How do I do this in moving? To make a connection in between. Immediacy – which takes me some time. Come off the path. It was a vertical register – it was a dropping in, a dropping into the world in a sense. But there is no reason to move almost. I know. I know it is a hybrid of pre-planning and automatic habits. How is this mode different? It was a vertical register – it was a dropping in, a dropping into the world in a sense. A really different kind of stillness, a less self-conscious stillness. I realize that I need time to digest. The depth of attention was limited in my own practicing of it, in what I am curious about. I am speculating though – this was not my experience. Do you think, I am wondering now, am I departing from my direct experiences? But I am wondering if the sound can be present, but not in a reaching way? There was a moment on the walk when the sun touched me – so it wasn’t so much that I was seeing the sun. I am speculating though, this was not my experience. Self-contained – the proximate edge of the body felt almost enclosing. A very different kind of movement, close to my body but not introspective. Very proximate to the body but not going into. All these very tiny shifts were unfolding in so many options. Everything else is placed inside it. I never used the word deviation before, but there comes another deviation – what comes in, I don’t know? The constitution of this proximate sphere is a condition in terms of once you are there, then there is a shift that needs to be maintained. The area of interest was much more close to my body, I stayed near but not going into. There was light coming onto my body but I did not only realize it with my eyes. The difference between the eyes reaching towards something or receiving. The place where the air was touching my skin. This I is not an egocentric I – it opens up, it becomes a medium to define this sphere, and for me what is relevant in the act of perceiving, what is in my experience, is this sphere which needs me as a point in the world to be defined. But this me, as this point in the world, is not the focus of my attention, but this sphere needs this point operatively in the world to exist. I continue with some movement and all of a sudden the immediateness of the sphere and some sensuous qualities came back and it started to fall into place.

26.03.2021

Text generated through the Practice of Reading (Distillation) using Conversation-as-Material transcripts as source text.

2.

Exploration. Perceiving. Establishing. Chain. Chain of things. Eyes. It is. The light. Finding. The lights of a car. Certain sense. Establishing. Projection. Appreciate. Actually. Able to touch. Realize. Curated. Support. With one another. Reach. In moving. Relation. Immediately. Immediate. Impulse. Movements happening. I have to. A different kind. In that zone. Immediate. Basis. Shifts. Dwell. Dwelling places. Allowing. Allowing. Out of. Drawn. Out of. Calling. Automatic. Dynamics. Intrinsically. Intrinsically connected. Confrontation. Sense-making systems. Between. Ordinarily. Modulation. Edge. Impulse. Stimulates. Light. Interrelates. Outside. Approximate. Vertical. Shadow. Into. Mobilization. Mobilize. Immediate. Whatever. Into. Impulse. Dropping down. In terms. Thresholds. Blossom. Listening. Situated. Sounded. Reaching. Staying near. Across. Going into. Map. Going down. Dropping into. Rubbing up against. Almost. In-formed. Con-tained. The edge was much more soft. And still something happened on the physical level of gentleness, in allowing myself, being allowed, not even allowing myself. It is happening, a chain of things happening. Thinking how is this mode different? A gentleness of being there, a negotiation. And also physically of joints articulating themselves differently. So they must find a kind of systematic attuning with one another. A feeling of moving into things, a quality of this moving into, of continuously moving into places. Without needing to, to make a connection in between. The balance of senses. Balance. The gentleness, the gentleness allows you to be, allows the constitution of the gentleness, allows the being there. I wonder. Exploration, exploring, ex– out and plurare – to weep, to cry. Through a certain mobilization. Rubbing up against. Actualise. Placeness. In between places. Self-contained. Tendency. Ground. Density. Again. Not connected to moving into. At the extremities where it was most attended to, touching. Today I had to move to form the thoughts differently. I could not write at all. To receive something, and what it is. To allow, or is it just happening? Layers of different thoughts happening, different languages - different. Being in-formed. I get information, digest information. To fall in place, coupled differently, again. Proximate. Immediate. Gradient. Receive. Softness. Unevenness. Allowed. Enabled. Time to digest. My capacity for access into a space of aesthetic action. Encountering from different angles. Allowing to be. Lines. Contingent. That moment. Somehow. Constitution of gentleness. The deviations also. Everything. Something happens. Choosing. It started to fall into place. Disappearance. Some sensuous quality. A possibility. Outline. A possible violation. Co-constitutes. Playing games. Going off and playing. Evolution. Or even that it retrospectively a sense of structure to what has been. Accepted as belonging to this. Congruent in a way. A bar. A kiosk. How to choose again? There is a coming alive in the moment, the aspect of releasing at the same time arising. And then this release through movement, it is not a projected movement. It definitely includes a specific knowledge, of knowing what I need to do now. That edge was rendered more porous. The deviations, another deviation. Distances. Thresholds. Senses. Skin. Qualities. Meet. Soft. Dropping. Moving. And the stains on the ground. Weather-wise and seasonally. Just being able to go to the floor, this feels contingent on much bigger agencies. Coming alive. Recognition of so many possibilities. And this is something that appears again. Wondering how thinking becomes differently possible within different circumstances. What seemed to emerge was the interplay between a sense of orientation and a sense of disorientation. A contradictory vector between establishing and moving, and what multidirectional physical movement does with it. Enabling a kind of fluidity. The line between these different modes was subtle. There is a coming alive. Releasing and at the same time arising. It starts to steam up and thickens. Space becomes a place and this is an exciting feeling. This breakdown in the classification of what is ‘my’. What I noticed was that I almost needed, no, I found, that certain kinds of micro-movements or other kinds of movements facilitated my movements. The egocentric I opens up and becomes a medium. There is a hyper-activation of subjectivity but subjectivity as egocentric experience disappears. It is through me, but I do not appear. The smell suddenly activated a different kind of stillness, a much less self-conscious stillness. Very subtle, but very present. I stayed near but not going into. The feeling of something, something about the felt sensation. Something of a dropping in, it was a vertical register. It was a dropping in, a dropping into. It stayed near, but not going into. There was no reason to move almost. It was almost like my attentional threshold was at the limit of my body, within the body but not so self-contained. A zone with spatial thickness. That edge might have to shimmer. I disappear. Taking. The gentleness, the gentleness that allowed the constitution of the gentleness, allowed the being there.

18.05.2021

Text generated through moving between the Practice of Reading (Noticing Attraction) and Practice of Reading (Distillation) (using Conversation-as-Material Distillation as source material) parallel to the Practice of Explorative Drawing and of Material Encounter.

3.

Connected to a station. Stationary. Inclination. Recall. Reach. Remind. Opening. Under-stand. Over. Specific. Depends. To begin. Interposed. Meditation. Gone. Sense. Back. Immediate. Mirror. Expand. Accept. Inform. Actions. Inter-esting. Shock. Tactile. Following. Interception. Bring. Hybrid. Lower. Level. Departing. Leverage. Mid range. Listening. Vertical. To what extent. Already. Automatic. Dynamics. Into. There. Different. Repaired. Middle range. Realise. Moving. Not in a reaching way. Arm. Tap into. Implies a change in texture. A contradictory vector between establishing the Nahbereich or constituting or co-constituting the Nahbereich. In moving. Listening or hearing and everything that was activated in listening and hearing. And I also had this question of how much is movement needed. But I could realise it with my eyes. Light. Surface. Shadow. I realise. The front and the back and the sides. Orient – as in arrangement. A different kind of choosing. This feeling of moving into things. The score is a tool that co-constitutes something, but it is not the only one. When I accepted the possibility of close and mid range, then this was positive for me inhabiting this. Momentum that arises from movement giving rise to movement. Still, everything else is placed inside it. More estranged in a way, a change, a change of texture. Speaker. Strengthened. Release. Rendered. Somehow. Uprising. Something. Surface. Settle. Face. Sur. Away. Porous. Something comes back. The focus shifts to another one. A practice of localising proximity, or delineating proximity, or constituting proximity. The investigation was to do with whether it is possible to reach with my fingers, with my physical body, the edge of my shadow. What do I allow to happen, do I decide to allow or is it just happening? And by becoming aware of it do I allow for? Things on the surface of the eye calling me to move. What does it mean to hold back? The motivation for the investigation was micro. Tuning in. Dropping in. Dropping into. In-formed. In-formation. That edge might have to shimmer – beyond the limit of the body’s proximate sphere. It stayed near but not going into. Maybe I was feeling doubtful or lacking confidence that the micro movement was sufficient. The line between these different modes was subtle. Not wanting to do something that felt expressive. Something to do with a shifting sense of gravity, and the shifting of the head. A lowering. A coming alive in the moment. The aspect of releasing and yet at the same time arising. All of a sudden, the immediateness of the sphere. Moves. Stay. You came. Touching. Soften. Difficulty. Opening. Nevertheless. Movement. Centre. Somehow. Non-expressivity. Something. Sufficient. Enabling. Allowed. Lens-based. Something of a dropping in, it was a vertical register. It was a dropping in, a dropping into.

20.05.2021

Text generated through moving between the Practice of Reading (Noticing Attraction) and the Practice of Distillation using Conversation-as-Material transcript as source material parallel to the Practice of Explorative Drawing and of Material Encounter.

4.

Possible. Experience. Capacity. Condensed. Mediated. Into. Incorporates. Now. Probably. Enter. Experience. Unfolding. Spoken. Language. Medium. Mode. Materialised. Situation. Easy. Presence. Focused. Wondering. Aboutness. Contact. Expanding. Drawn. To. Object. Create. Exercise. Constitution. Presence. Being. Shaping. Nameless. Situations. Tuning. Mute. Experience. Rubbing.¹ 

It was really a physical sensation turning into an image. The place where the air was touching my skin. Spaciousness then appeared, or something of a space. Maybe not spaciousness - space appeared, and then it became spacious. The felt sensation of sound within the proximate sphere. Accepting it as being part of my structure. The continuity of space is actually always happening, this impression of continuity. This transition between the inner and outer. What is this becoming aware of? As belonging to. I had a feeling of it expanding. Where the edge was much more soft. This kind of lively lightness – a quality of lightness but within the materiality of the paper was really striking. To feel the sound of thought and my breath arise. Does it arise some place in my body?² 

Alternative. Shapes. Perceptual. Range. Shaping. Listening. Inclination. Shimmer. Abandoning. Continuing. Shimmering. Touching. Forming. Flight.³ 

The question of touching, of the with. Not as a solid as it seems to be, and it seems to be the most solid thing. There are all these nameless situations or moments that are not graspable yet. How do you modify the frame implicitly? As being part of my structure. Articulated sounds that touch the stone. Not to bring to language. But to take a pencil to produce articulated signs, touching the stone. To keep the fundamental continuity of the mode of doing. Immediate because it also relates to the question of how, how are my senses mobilised in order to constitute this sphere. It depends of the inclination of my head. Language unfolding from experience. Making. In the same key or texture.⁴ 

Happens. Investigation. Listen. Necessary. Stays. Dropping. In.⁵ 

The sense of muteness, it was not silent. It stayed local to the body, very proximate to the body. How is this mode different? There was something of a dropping in, it was a vertical register. It stayed near, but not going into. Where is my interest going? This felt different, it felt a cognitive operation, but not a linguistic operation. It is expanding, I had a feeling of it expanding, at the edges of the space, emerging.⁶ 

Foregrounded. Letting go. Density. Capacity. First. Beyond. Sensation. Encounter. Shimmer. Shift. It. But. Fluctuate.⁷

The direction of things. All this density. The sounding of the things. To observe the sounding of the things. The sounding. What do I follow and where does it come from? Listening. Outside the attentional threshold, the immediate sphere - to notice, but not to attend. What is not belonging to this sphere? Tactile perception – not a rejection of listening or hearing. In other words. There are sounds there, the experience is not without sounds. Around it, not part of it. What is seen or touched, not excluded. Not departing from direct experience, the difference between the eyes reaching or receiving. The proximate experience at the level of the organs, of the ear. Not so much the seeing but the felt sensation. Of sounds reverberating. What can be recognised in experience, an edge. The density of experience. At the extremities. The depth of the proximate sphere, activated as a zone with spatial thickness, the felt sensations of the body, fluctuating beyond the edge.8 

16.06.2021

Text generated through a sequence of Ecologies in Action:

1, 3, 5, 7. Practice of Reading (Noticing Attraction) using Conversation-as-Material [Distillation] in parallel to Practices of Drawing and of Material Encounter.

2, 4, 6. Practice of Reading (Distillation) using Conversation-as-Material [Distillation] in parallel to Practices of Drawing and of Material Encounter.

8. Practice of Live Transcription (of Conversation-as-Material) in parallel to Practices of Close Video Observation; Proximity Sphere (variation with camera),Drawing and Material Encounter.

5.

Relating. Noticing. Spaciousness. Shimmer. Part. Spacious. Capacity. Incorporate. Somehow. Something. Moving. Abandoning. Moment. Particular. Perception. Correspondence. Coincide. Letting. Noting. Coming. Thinking. Stillness. Shifts. Continue. Sounding.¹

There is this threshold. There was something of a dropping in. The continuity of space or where the space is actually happening – this impression of continuity. It stayed near but not going into. The experience of space just through a piece of paper is enough. But at same time realising that there is the other and there is a coming together. A distributed field of agencies. They coincide. Even endless in a way.²

Flickery. Lively. Concrete. Density. Perceive. Eyes. Resonating. Sense. Becoming. Narrowing.³

This mute quality of presence, a material, physical presence. Here, there was something very much to do with letting go of the sense of the history. Endless in a way. There was a kind of perceptual flashing. I am also wondering what is its presence there. Not to bring to language. There is a shift there. It is not so much physical health, perceptual health, but cognitive health. How perceptual capacity is strengthened or diminished by certain ways of using it. Not as solid as it seems to be. A way of acting, a disposition.⁴

Diffusing. Thinking. Appearing. Shapes. Different. Articulated. Mediate. Embodied. Example. Continuing. Inclination. Stay. With. Operation. Movement. Information. Condensed. Attuning. Confrontation. Nameless. Modify. Stillness. Mobilization. Intention. Discern. Realized. Coincide.⁵

How much is movement needed? All these nameless situations or moments that are not graspable yet. There are a lot of growing processes going on that I cannot name. Overwhelmed by all this density, I almost cannot find any words. Becoming aware of, becoming connected with, getting in touch with. This threshold of rubbing up against habits of being in the world. Sound can be present, but not in a reaching way. The egocentric I opens up and becomes a medium. Again, there was something of the dropping in, it was a vertical register. It was a dropping in, a dropping into the world in a sense. That edge was rendered porous. Not forcing language to be a grasping tool, but a touching tool.⁶

Continuity. Unfolding. Discern. Area. Smell. Forming. Stay near. Threshold. Resonating. Spheres. Spaciousness. Shifts. Muteness. Listening. Breath. Medium. Density. Extremities. Capacity. Hands. Blind. Becoming.⁷

A zone with spatial thickness – where that edge might have to shimmer. What do I follow and where does it come from? I did not realize it with my eyes I also realized it with my hands, with the front and the back and the sides. Because my eyes are conditioned to operating in a certain way. To move with. Moving with a distributed field of agencies. It is like the stone – one focused condensed image, one physical image that I had. It is expanding. The attempt to form words. It stayed near but not going into. I let words appear. It was not about. Like a mental note. Overwhelmed by all this density – and I understood that this is a momentum that I can grasp. Which takes some time – there is this threshold. Unable to judge, to touch making a small movement. It depends on the inclination of my head. It stayed near but not going into.⁸

Incorporate. Listening. Balance. Ears. Possibilities. Mobilize. Functionality. Perception. Investigation. Conditioned. Reinforcing. Dissimilar. Informing. Different. Capacity. Operation. Organ. Operation. Engagement. Appropriating. Encounter. Foreground. Impulse. Shimmer. In mind. Spaciousness. Receive. Endless. Wider.⁹

This mute quality of presence, of the physical material presence. Language unfolding from that experience, in the same key or texture as that experience. How the language shapes the way that I am, or how I am present in a way. The presence of this – how does it shape my presence? Only arising through. It did not come as something that I could imagine.¹⁰

Acting. Thinking. Withness. Form. Forming. Mobilizing. Relation. Now. Wondering. Withness. The stone. Constitution. Stone. Spheres. Mouth. Scent. Moment. Other agencies. Withness. Disappears.¹¹

Egocentric experience disappears - I disappear in the moment. For making possible a certain way of relation. I wasn’t appearing. In terms of becoming in touch. This was within my proximate sphere. There are different forms of presence. Defined by a way of acting, by a disposition. There are all these nameless situations or moments which are not graspable yet. There is this quality in the forming of the sounding while talking, and I can feel being here with you interacting with the thought and at the same time there as this stone and this stone in front of me, and I am also wondering what is its presence there? This language-with, thinking-with, unfolding. And I wonder, what is this mouth, this tongue, forming. The presence of this, how does it shape my presence? The stone is so material, so concrete, and so dense in a way. The material is resonating – this moment of becoming. Even endless, in a way. And then there is just this paper in front of me, with lines on it. This materiality of the stone. And the felt sensation of sound. The mute quality of presence. A material, physical presence which was shaping somehow, it is shaping. That edge might have to shimmer. The presence of this, how does it shape my presence? This shimmer, the shimmering of it. The sense of giving time to something, giving time to something with a certain kind of engagement. There are lines on a paper, or maybe even two lines. But it is somehow an engrained process. This kind of lively lightness, a quality of lightness but within the materiality of the paper. What did the stone make me be? An object of perception. Funnily enough, the stone was now for me a completely mute object. I had a feeling of it expanding. Mute. It was more the space emerging.¹²

Doing. Distributed. Relating. Appear. Feeling. Condition. Density. Stillness. A note. No tendency. The sounding. Enough. Stillness. Expanding. Stillness. Inclination. Wondering. Sounding. Wondering. Immediately. Or not. Related. Needed.¹³

Overwhelmed by all this density. A variety of interaction. It was a kind of perceptual flashing. Both possibilities are there. A lively lightness but within the materiality of the paper. Thinking about it in a different way. Flickery and lively. To observe the border. Perceptual flashing. This impression of continuity. This moment of becoming. This coming together, realizing. Because my eyes are conditioned.¹⁴

This is the specificity of this practice. Localizing proximity, constituting proximity. But not only focused on that. Once you are there, then there is a shift. The resonances of what happens. Within this field of proximity, this attentional threshold. Dissolving the sense of the representational. Not strengthening the sense of me. Not a containment or withdrawal. That edge is rendered porous, representation collapses. That edge was much more soft. Only in the beyond, not disembodied, through felt experience. Comprised of other agencies. That presence of the I, the I becomes a medium. Subjectivity not disappearing. It cannot be me who is perceiving. I perceive from this point, this I is not an ego-centric I. It becomes a medium. This me as a point in the world is not my focus of attention. I was not appearing. Subjectivity as ego-centric experience disappears. A non-egocentric use of subjectivity. A material presence, shaping. To keep the fundamental continuity. Not forcing language as a grasping tool. Abandoning this rigidity. Shaped by the feeling of the stone, this turning. Not referring to about-ness. A certain mobilization of the medium. In terms of becoming in touch. This threshold of rubbing up against habits of being. There is some kind of confrontation. There was something of a dropping in. Getting in touch with, contacting. Delineating proximity, constituting proximity. Somehow space appears - spaciousness. This moment of becoming, this coming together. Expanding, endless. A zone with spatial thickness. The edge may have to shimmer. A kind of perceptual flashing. A lively lightness, a quality of lightness. That habit shapes my experience of the world. Not as solid as it seems to be, and it seems to be the most solid of things. A variety of interaction, coinciding. It stayed near but not going into. All this density. I almost cannot find any words.¹⁵

18.06.2021

Text generated through a sequence of Ecologies in Action:

1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 Practice of Reading (Noticing Attraction) using Conversation-as-Material [Distillation Part 1] in parallel to Practices of Drawing and of Material Encounter.

2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 Practice of Reading (Conversation Distillation Part 1) using Conversation-as-Material [Distillation Part 1] in parallel to Practices of Drawing and of Material Encounter.

15. Practice of Live Transcription (of Conversation-as-Material) in parallel to Practices of Close Video Observation; Proximity Sphere (variation with camera), Drawing and Material Encounter.

5.

Relating. Noticing. Spaciousness. Shimmer. Part. Spacious. Capacity. Incorporate. Somehow. Something. Moving. Abandoning. Moment. Particular. Perception. Correspondence. Coincide. Letting. Noting. Coming. Thinking. Stillness. Shifts. Continue. Sounding.¹

There is this threshold. There was something of a dropping in. The continuity of space or where the space is actually happening – this impression of continuity. It stayed near but not going into. The experience of space just through a piece of paper is enough. But at same time realising that there is the other and there is a coming together. A distributed field of agencies. They coincide. Even endless in a way.²

Flickery. Lively. Concrete. Density. Perceive. Eyes. Resonating. Sense. Becoming. Narrowing.³

This mute quality of presence, a material, physical presence. Here, there was something very much to do with letting go of the sense of the history. Endless in a way. There was a kind of perceptual flashing. I am also wondering what is its presence there. Not to bring to language. There is a shift there. It is not so much physical health, perceptual health, but cognitive health. How perceptual capacity is strengthened or diminished by certain ways of using it. Not as solid as it seems to be. A way of acting, a disposition.⁴

Diffusing. Thinking. Appearing. Shapes. Different. Articulated. Mediate. Embodied. Example. Continuing. Inclination. Stay. With. Operation. Movement. Information. Condensed. Attuning. Confrontation. Nameless. Modify. Stillness. Mobilization. Intention. Discern. Realized. Coincide.⁵

How much is movement needed? All these nameless situations or moments that are not graspable yet. There are a lot of growing processes going on that I cannot name. Overwhelmed by all this density, I almost cannot find any words. Becoming aware of, becoming connected with, getting in touch with. This threshold of rubbing up against habits of being in the world. Sound can be present, but not in a reaching way. The egocentric I opens up and becomes a medium. Again, there was something of the dropping in, it was a vertical register. It was a dropping in, a dropping into the world in a sense. That edge was rendered porous. Not forcing language to be a grasping tool, but a touching tool.⁶

Continuity. Unfolding. Discern. Area. Smell. Forming. Stay near. Threshold. Resonating. Spheres. Spaciousness. Shifts. Muteness. Listening. Breath. Medium. Density. Extremities. Capacity. Hands. Blind. Becoming.⁷

A zone with spatial thickness – where that edge might have to shimmer. What do I follow and where does it come from? I did not realize it with my eyes I also realized it with my hands, with the front and the back and the sides. Because my eyes are conditioned to operating in a certain way. To move with. Moving with a distributed field of agencies. It is like the stone – one focused condensed image, one physical image that I had. It is expanding. The attempt to form words. It stayed near but not going into. I let words appear. It was not about. Like a mental note. Overwhelmed by all this density – and I understood that this is a momentum that I can grasp. Which takes some time – there is this threshold. Unable to judge, to touch making a small movement. It depends on the inclination of my head. It stayed near but not going into.⁸

Incorporate. Listening. Balance. Ears. Possibilities. Mobilize. Functionality. Perception. Investigation. Conditioned. Reinforcing. Dissimilar. Informing. Different. Capacity. Operation. Organ. Operation. Engagement. Appropriating. Encounter. Foreground. Impulse. Shimmer. In mind. Spaciousness. Receive. Endless. Wider.⁹

This mute quality of presence, of the physical material presence. Language unfolding from that experience, in the same key or texture as that experience. How the language shapes the way that I am, or how I am present in a way. The presence of this – how does it shape my presence? Only arising through. It did not come as something that I could imagine.¹⁰

Acting. Thinking. Withness. Form. Forming. Mobilizing. Relation. Now. Wondering. Withness. The stone. Constitution. Stone. Spheres. Mouth. Scent. Moment. Other agencies. Withness. Disappears.¹¹

Egocentric experience disappears - I disappear in the moment. For making possible a certain way of relation. I wasn’t appearing. In terms of becoming in touch. This was within my proximate sphere. There are different forms of presence. Defined by a way of acting, by a disposition. There are all these nameless situations or moments which are not graspable yet. There is this quality in the forming of the sounding while talking, and I can feel being here with you interacting with the thought and at the same time there as this stone and this stone in front of me, and I am also wondering what is its presence there? This language-with, thinking-with, unfolding. And I wonder, what is this mouth, this tongue, forming. The presence of this, how does it shape my presence? The stone is so material, so concrete, and so dense in a way. The material is resonating – this moment of becoming. Even endless, in a way. And then there is just this paper in front of me, with lines on it. This materiality of the stone. And the felt sensation of sound. The mute quality of presence. A material, physical presence which was shaping somehow, it is shaping. That edge might have to shimmer. The presence of this, how does it shape my presence? This shimmer, the shimmering of it. The sense of giving time to something, giving time to something with a certain kind of engagement. There are lines on a paper, or maybe even two lines. But it is somehow an engrained process. This kind of lively lightness, a quality of lightness but within the materiality of the paper. What did the stone make me be? An object of perception. Funnily enough, the stone was now for me a completely mute object. I had a feeling of it expanding. Mute. It was more the space emerging.¹²

Doing. Distributed. Relating. Appear. Feeling. Condition. Density. Stillness. A note. No tendency. The sounding. Enough. Stillness. Expanding. Stillness. Inclination. Wondering. Sounding. Wondering. Immediately. Or not. Related. Needed.¹³

Overwhelmed by all this density. A variety of interaction. It was a kind of perceptual flashing. Both possibilities are there. A lively lightness but within the materiality of the paper. Thinking about it in a different way. Flickery and lively. To observe the border. Perceptual flashing. This impression of continuity. This moment of becoming. This coming together, realizing. Because my eyes are conditioned.¹⁴

This is the specificity of this practice. Localizing proximity, constituting proximity. But not only focused on that. Once you are there, then there is a shift. The resonances of what happens. Within this field of proximity, this attentional threshold. Dissolving the sense of the representational. Not strengthening the sense of me. Not a containment or withdrawal. That edge is rendered porous, representation collapses. That edge was much more soft. Only in the beyond, not disembodied, through felt experience. Comprised of other agencies. That presence of the I, the I becomes a medium. Subjectivity not disappearing. It cannot be me who is perceiving. I perceive from this point, this I is not an ego-centric I. It becomes a medium. This me as a point in the world is not my focus of attention. I was not appearing. Subjectivity as ego-centric experience disappears. A non-egocentric use of subjectivity. A material presence, shaping. To keep the fundamental continuity. Not forcing language as a grasping tool. Abandoning this rigidity. Shaped by the feeling of the stone, this turning. Not referring to about-ness. A certain mobilization of the medium. In terms of becoming in touch. This threshold of rubbing up against habits of being. There is some kind of confrontation. There was something of a dropping in. Getting in touch with, contacting. Delineating proximity, constituting proximity. Somehow space appears - spaciousness. This moment of becoming, this coming together. Expanding, endless. A zone with spatial thickness. The edge may have to shimmer. A kind of perceptual flashing. A lively lightness, a quality of lightness. That habit shapes my experience of the world. Not as solid as it seems to be, and it seems to be the most solid of things. A variety of interaction, coinciding. It stayed near but not going into. All this density. I almost cannot find any words.¹⁵

18.06.2021

Text generated through a sequence of Ecologies in Action:

1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 Practice of Reading (Noticing Attraction) using Conversation-as-Material [Distillation Part 1] in parallel to Practices of Drawing and of Material Encounter.

2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 Practice of Reading (Conversation Distillation Part 1) using Conversation-as-Material [Distillation Part 1] in parallel to Practices of Drawing and of Material Encounter.

15. Practice of Live Transcription (of Conversation-as-Material) in parallel to Practices of Close Video Observation; Proximity Sphere (variation with camera), Drawing and Material Encounter.